Is there a lot of difference between ancient and modern Italian?
Well, you have to take into account that it’s not just the language that’s changed but our way of thinking too. What I’m trying to do on this album is express today’s thoughts using yesterday’s language. And that often gives the songs a poetic, dream-like feel, as well as an unreal tragic edge at times. I love the expressions they used in that era. They’re so rich and opulent. It’s like the title of the album, Etterna – in modern Italian the meaning’s exactly the same (“eternal”), but you spell it with one ‘t’ rather than two. For me, spelling it with two “t’s” was like a little nod towards Dante because that’s the way he wrote. Dante lived in an age where the Italian language, born of Latin and Provençal, was going through huge changes. It’s not rare looking back on an ancient text from those times to find three different ways of spelling used within the same document. Personally, I wanted to give a special meaning to the word ‘etterna’ and spelling it the old way meant deliberately p
