An old man sitting on the bank of a sort of human river of people got there for the feast of the Madonna di Viggiano, advised me not to buy his spare unsold zampogna (Italian bagpipe) which was lying on an upside down fruit box, because he said it didnt work well. If it was Zi Nicola said the swindler, who was saying that, it had to be true and it was surely a crazy thing to insist on buying it, but for me it represented a challenge: I had been playing so many instruments, I was thought to have a musical ear, I was really good at tuning every sort of flutes, sikus etc why shouldnt I have been able to set a zampogna that played like the horn of a truck? I paid L. 300.000 for it (it was 1990) but it became the souvenir that for ten years was hanged on the wall of my entrance door. Anyway it was a first bumping into it! Some months later I left the zampogna in Auletta near Salerno, in the hand of Zi Nicolas son who in the same place where his father had lived the last scraps of his life confirmed the same: that zampogna didnt work. In 1993 I went to Scapoli for the first time, I went to see Piero Ricci, that I had been said was the best zampogna player and zampogna tuner in the world. I gave him my instrument faithful in his ability, but after a couple of months he gave it back to me; it was still out of tune. Impossible to be tuned he said. As I was in Scapoli I bought a zampogna by Gerardo Gualtieri that Piero Ricci could easily tune; he was also really so kind to show me all the details to make plastic reeds by myself. Few others were so kind: Lino Maniscalco, the great maestro Antonio Forastiero, the only one who was able to give out a wonderful sound from Zi Nicolas zampogna. Ten years had passed and lots of things had happened. I have always been curious and unfaithful towards the musical instruments, in fact after the first passionate impetus for a new instrument, I was usually caught by some other cord or bellow instrument: flute, quena, charango, cuatro, sikus, accordion, organetto; so many betrayals, so many discoveries, all pieces of a rich puzzle of a stimulating polygamy. In this harem, the zampogna has been my favourite partner. It is almost impossible for me to avoid its fascination coming from its ancestral sound and polyphony. The meticulous work necessary to get it in tune, is a sort of never ending challenge which keeps our love always alive. In 2000 I devoted a Xmas CD to it La zampogna annunziatrice. It was an homage to its history by tracing back the path through centuries but also an expression of the suggestions of the sounds that I had been discovering and experimenting into the wide unexplored musical area where this instrument had got me to. An emotional journey on the wave of unusual combination of harmony together with strange and improbable tonalities, a journey that is thick with interweaving dialogues between instruments of different origins: the vibraphone, the contrabass, the charango  a journey where an old leather bag, the zampogna gives birth to new breath.