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Given the popularity of all things Celtic among North American aficionados, the low U.S. profile of the Italian folk revival (pretty much contemporaneous with the Celtic phenomenon) is regrettable, especially given the vibrant character of Celtic-Italian musical cross-fertilization in Europe, and Italian folk music's openness to influences from the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Levant, North Africa and beyond. In this respect, the music testifies to Italy's long reign as the cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean.

But in the United States, despite a large population of Italian descent, what passes for Italian folk music long ago descended to the status of cartoon stereotype and omerta cliché. It may have something to do with the linguistic accessibility of Celtic music (at least the Celtic music sung in English), the affinities between British Isles and American folk music, and the popular if erroneous notion of a normative British-U.S. cultural tradition, as certified in the United States' own folk revival.

But a broader awareness of Italian roots music in North America also has been hampered by a dearth of record labels covering the music, and spotty international distribution. Now, a number of recent reissues and new recordings make the music potentially more accessible to savvy U.S. audiences, although it still takes some digging. The recordings surveyed in this two-part series reveal the diverse character of the Italian folk process, while underscoring the extraordinary, often tragic human consequences of Italy's difficult and uneven accommodation with the peculiar culture of late global capitalism. The music reveals how folk traditions in post-war Italy have constituted a compelling expressive record of the rapid cultural, socioeconomic and political changes that have marked the country's dramatic transformation since Mussolini's 1943 demise.

Long before "world music" became the global marketing category du jour, an odd fraternity of collectors ranged the planet seeking an elusive folk music fix. Among the most prescient was Alan Lomax (1915-2002), who in a chance 1948 Manhattan street encounter persuaded the president of Columbia Records to underwrite what would become the sweeping Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (recorded 1949-1958). Rounder's richly annotated Italian Treasury series (re-released in digitally remastered form over the past three years) presents a prodigious array of music, anything but the Chef Boyardee pop hash of "Amore" and "O Sole Mio". Indeed, what Lomax and collaborating ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella documented, the raw immediacy of their field recordings, rocked the armchair folklore establishment back in Rome, sparking the music's fundamental reassessment and informing a more thorough understanding of the vibrant breadth of Italian folk song. These recordings have lost none of their power.

Italy's undeveloped rural road system, the late arrival of radio and television in the countryside, the highly skewed distribution of wealth, and a brutal history of political repression all worked to preserve the rural, pre-industrial folk traditions documented in the collection. Nearly a half century after the fact, its conception and breadth reflect the vocal and instrumental diversity of Italian expressive folk culture at a moment when rapid socioeconomic change was beginning to undercut the pastoral economy, crush peasant political organization, depopulate the countryside, create an urban proletariat, and erode the transmission of local oral traditions at the core of the folk process. The process fundamentally transformed the communities and people among whom these vital oral traditions are now largely a memory. The 22-track sampler is representative of more than 100 field sessions logged in 12 of Italy's 21 provinces: Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Emilia Romagna, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lazio, Liguria, Piemonte, Sardegna, Sicilia and Toscana.

Calabria province was Carpitella's home. This fact produced an entire volume of Calabrian music, little documented prior to the Lomax project. In the mid-1950s Calabria was a zone of high unemployment and intense poverty on Italy's southern periphery, making it, in Lomax's view, an ideal place to capture still-vibrant folk traditions untainted by commercialism. The repertoire includes work chants of fishermen and peasants, love songs, courting and wedding tunes, tarantellas (dances of possession), religious and pastoral songs, and lullabies. Perhaps the most unusual tracks reveal the vocal heterophony and drone of the province's Albanian-descent villages (e.g., "Alla Campagnola", "Ce lu Toccamu lu Peduzzu a Rosa", "Pumellu Russu e Bandera de Nave"; compare Rounder's Northern and Central Italy and the Albanians of Calabria, not reviewed here), marking the influence of Balkans music on southern Italy. Where used, instruments include diatonic and chromatic accordion, zampogna (bagpipes, of four distinct types), harmonica, various flutes, shawm (an oboe-like woodwind), mandolin, acoustic guitar, chitarra battente, violin, lira (a pear-shaped fiddle) and a variety of percussion.

At the other end of the country, in what would become the Italian Riviera, Liguria's trallalero tradition emerged as an improvised five-part male a cappella polyphony whose voices range from falsetto to tenor, chitarra (guitar), baritone and bass. In the wine shops where Genoese longshoremen gathered after work, Lomax documented a liquid, contrapuntal vocal style he traced to Alpine Europe. This was modern urban music, not averse to combining the folk repertoire with popular strains garnered from radio and recordings. Lest anyone think Lomax invariably imposed a folk-purist embargo against the insurgency of popular influence, check out the boogie-woogie chops of Genoa's trallaleri in a remarkable a cappella rendition of Glenn Miller's "In the Mood". This previously unreleased track underscores American popular culture's impact in post-war Italy, an early predicate of a multiple worldwide process of mutual cultural hybridization in which no tradition can claim dominance, at least not for long. More of the singularly resonant Ligurian vocal styles can be heard on the recently released Liguria: Baiardo and Imperia and Liguria: Polyphony of Ceriana. Having travelled in the spring of 2002 to Liguria, where globalization has worked its dubious sorcery, where abandoned hillside olive orchards have given way to condos, vacation homes, tourism over-development and a cut-flower industry already being out-competed by even cheaper labor in Spain, Colombia and East Africa, I can testify that the music heard on these signal recordings is largely a thing of local memory and the national archive.

To the south, Sicily has been a cultural crossroads since the era of ancient Greece, occupied by a succession of imperial powers whose presence lent an arresting pan-Mediterranean flavor to the island's furious, tangled skein of folk traditions. What Lomax found was music inseparable from the fabric of everyday life. Sicily's 29 tracks (the majority previously unreleased) represent the music of religious and community festivities; dance tunes; lullabies; epic singing and storytelling; and the occupational songs of artisans, cart drivers, farmers and farm workers, herders, fishermen, miners and salt workers.

This is stripped-down, bare-bones music whose stark sensibilities span Sicily's length and breadth: the sulphur miners' melismatic chant to spare Jew's-harp accompaniment, the tammurriata drumming of the street festivals, the plaintive a cappella chorus of female almond sorters, and the d acordo and a la ruggiera male choral styles of Messina. Instrumental genres include the familiar, frenzied tarantella, played variously on trombone, friscalettu (cane flute), mandolin, guitar, drums and tambourine; the pole dance tradition, whose friscalettu, accordion, guitar and tambourine produce a lively melodic weave; and the ciaramedda a paru (twin-chanter bagpipe) commonly played at both sacred and secular festivals. Also notable are two songs by Orazio Strano, the celebrated Sicilian balladeer.

It's a long way from the aural rawness of post-war Sicily to the refined oeuvre of Armós, whose scholarly, classically trained, contemporary ensemble seeks more to recuperate the feeling of Sicilian traditional music than to reconstruct it exactly, if such a thing were possible. Acknowledging the interpretive license they have granted themselves, Armós cultivates an "early-music" approach, scouring 19th-century song collections, assembling an instrumental array that invokes, if not a precise sonic rendering, then perhaps more critically, the lyrical feeling of the Sicilian past. The seven-person ensemble (with several more guests) mounts a daunting tapestry of strings, wind instruments and percussion, the sum of which, they readily admit, invokes rather than replicates Sicilian musical traditions: arpa spagnola ("Spanish harp"), chittarino, vihuela de peñola, colascione, liuto, lyra, viola da gamba, rebab, symphònia, ney, friscalettu, bifera (an oboe precursor), tabla tunisia, tamburi a cornice and darabuka. The recording has a measured, reflective, Renaissance texture, but remains thoroughly modern music.

Across the Tyrrhenian Sea lies Naples, which Greek legend holds as the ancient site where the Sirens sought to cast their spell upon Ulysses. Their failure wasn't for lack of lyricism, an enduring Neapolitan quality. Even the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart made a musical pilgrimage to Napoli with his father. The music's lighthearted attractions are manifest in a lively mix of songs surveyed by singer, guitarist and bassist Romano Zanotti. Zanotti played traditional Latin American music for many years, but with La Chanson Napolitaine de 1650 à 1987, a two-CD chronology covering three centuries of Neapolitan folk song, Zanotti returns to his roots. The extensive informative notes are in French and English, with a transcription of the Italian lyrics, and French and English translations, making this a worthy introduction to Canzone Napoletana. One song the listener won't find here is "Funicoli, Funicola" (1880), the popular Naples chestnut with which North American audiences are probably most familiar. But with Zanotti they certainly will be able to savor the aesthetic influences and picaresque passions that have long animated Neapolitan folk tradition.

Also hailing from Naples, albeit in an activist vein, and at a moment when the idea of European Union seems up for a second reading, Spaccanapoli offers a piercing view of the project of continental integration from the militant perspective of industrial workers whose interests have been sacrificed in the process. In local parlance Spaccanapoli means "split Naples", a pointed reference to the street that makes concrete the class divisions exacerbated by the culturally sanitizing imposition of Berlusconi's new economic order. Hence Spaccanapoli channels a critical political outlook through the folk media of southern Italy and beyond.

The band is an offshoot of Grupo Operario ("worker's group") E Zezi, formed as a street-artist brigade in the 1970s by socialist autoworkers at the Naples Alfa Romeo factory. Spaccanapoli comprises Marcello Colasurdo (vocals, tammorra or frame drum, tamburello), Monica Pinto (vocals), and the abandoned instrumental genius of Antonio Fraioli (violin, piano, keyboards, percussion), Oscar Montalbano (guitar, bass) and Emilio de Matteo (guitar). They are joined by a host of fine session players on bagpipe, flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, mandolin, mandoloncello, bass and percussion.

The musical settings are stunning in conception and execution, inspired by the region's throaty vocals, its tammurriata street rhythms, tarantellas (dances of possession), brass band music, and myriad pan-Mediterranean (including Arabic) influences. Spaccanapoli conjures up a compelling melodic and percussive passion upon which the soul-rending vocal interplay of Pinto and Colasurdo soars with spellbinding intensity. I had the delightful opportunity to hear the band live at the summer 2002 Bardentreffen Festival in Nürnberg, three days of live music at numerous outdoor sites scattered around that medieval city. The group's nine members made a dramatic stage entrance, all playing frame drums, peppering their rollicking non-stop two-hour set with a variety of folk dances, and interacting with an enthusiastic audience that simply wouldn't let them leave the stage.

"Aneme Perze", the title track, means "lost souls", a reference to the cult of the dead of the Neapolitan underclass. But if anything, these fervent songs will raise the dead and quicken the forsaken. With seething, unadorned rage Spaccanapoli sings in "O' Mare" of industrial pollution's destruction of the Neapolitan fishing fleet; in "Sant' Anastasia" of the careless factory explosion that left twelve workers dead; in "A' Ferriera" of an ironworker killed by a spill of molten steel; in "Siente Munacie" of "the ghosts of the past... come back/ There's still hunger, death and disease, it's always the same".

In a reckless, enormously inspired experiment with the roots traditions of southern Italy and beyond, Spaccanapoli speaks powerfully to unemployed youth whose disaffection with a corrupt system and foreclosed life prospects find voice in "Piazza Dante" ("For thieves thrive and boast about it.../ Ministers and judges are a calamity for the poor"). In "Vesuvio" the nearby legendary volcano becomes a looming metaphor of human destruction: "Mountains of lava, of hundreds of streets/ You hold my life in your hands/ Is this a place for homes, or a place for a jail/ Where you're locked from morning 'til night.../ Whether you smoke or not you still make a noise/ It's the fire you bear in your heart". The lyrics alone cannot capture the relentless vitality of a band that marks out dangerous ideological terrain with vintage proletarian wrath, issuing a wake-up call to the would-be architects of a new corporate Europe. From the land of Antonio Gramsci and the Red Brigades, of Fellini, Rosellini and Wertmuller, Spaccanapoli already has the European folk circuit in its thrall, and now seems poised to rivet the consciousness of a new global base.

In an equally idiosyncratic project, if Verdi, Puccini and Donizetti were to collaborate with Fellini, Tom Waits and Manu Chao, the vivid result would approximate Banda Ionica's inspired retrofitting of Sicilian marching band music associated with religious festivals and funeral processions. Building on the strength of Passione, its 1999 cult success, Matri Mia unfurls a brassy, percussive paean to extraordinary women. In mid-2002, Matri Mia held its own on the European world-music top-ten radio charts, reflecting its iconographic obsession and Latin-tinged multilingual repertoire (sung in Italian, Spanish, French and German). Check out Spanish singer El Mono Loco's gravely, dissolute "Espinita", or Cristina Zavalloni's Brechtian, coquettish, operatic interpretation of the Sicilian "Votu e Mi Rivotu". Is this music Italian in truth or spirit? Both, undeniably, and Banda Ionica's work does not mark the end of a timeworn tradition, but a kind of spiny, unrepentant resurrection.