The Day I Returned to Virgil

How a Re-reading of the Aeneid Became a Sixteen-Part Symphonic Poem

Sea

https://soundcloud.com/massimilianofolegatti/sets/aeneis-2

On April 13, 2026, I opened the Aeneid once again.

I had no idea that sixteen musical compositions would emerge from that reading.

Every work begins with a question.

In my case, the question was simple:

where can clarity still be found?

We live in an age overwhelmed by an endless torrent of words. Every day we encounter news, commentary, analyses, and opinions that overlap and collide without pause. Information multiplies, yet understanding often diminishes. We find ourselves immersed in a continuous noise that risks distancing us from what is essential.

For some time, I had felt the need for a language capable of restoring precision, measure, and depth.

I did not imagine that the answer had been waiting for me for more than two thousand years.

That morning, after breakfast, I reopened Virgil’s Aeneid.

It was a familiar presence, preserved among the memories of my school years. The verses I had studied as a teenager suddenly came alive again. As I reread the lines of the Proem, I experienced an unexpected sensation: those words still possessed their original strength.

They did not appear to me as archaeological relics.

They felt contemporary.

Virgil’s Latin had preserved something I had been searching for: the union of formal rigor and profound human experience.

At that moment, an idea was born.

I did not wish to create a simple musical illustration of the poem.

I wanted to enter into a dialogue with it.

Thus AENEIS came into being: a free musical transposition of the Aeneid, articulated in sixteen symphonic movements inspired by the human and spiritual journey of Virgil’s characters.

I began composing while reading the hexameters one after another.

Each image generated a sound.

Each episode suggested a musical substance.

Each character seemed to possess a distinct timbral identity.

I did not follow a rigid plan.

I listened.

Whenever a word or a scene ignited my imagination, I built a sonic nucleus around that inspiration. A shield. A storm. A departure. A battle. A prophecy. An act of pietas.

The music grew through thematic blocks, like a mosaic assembled slowly over time.

Throughout this process, I came to understand something I may always have known.

Great works do not belong to the past.

They remain alive because they speak of what never changes.

Aeneas confronts trials that every human being can recognize.

Loss.

Responsibility.

Doubt.

Fidelity to a mission.

The strength to continue walking when everything appears to collapse.

For this reason, I felt his story to be extraordinarily close.

As I composed, I often asked myself whether it still made sense, in the twenty-first century, to engage with epic poetry.

The answer emerged from the music itself.

Yes, it does.

Because epic is not merely about heroes.

It is about the inner posture of a human being before destiny.

Aeneas is memorable not because he triumphs.

He is memorable because he does not retreat.

He passes through suffering without abandoning hope.

He accepts the weight of his mission.

He remains standing.

This image accompanied me throughout the entire creation of AENEIS.

I often thought that we too, men and women of the third millennium, are called to a form of resistance.

Not necessarily against an external enemy.

But against everything that distances us from our humanity.

Against resignation.

Against cynicism.

Against indifference.

I have long described this inner tension as humanistic resistance.

Not a theory.

Not an ideology.

Rather, a daily choice.

The decision to continue believing in the dignity of the human being.

In our capacity to love.

To create.

To improve ourselves.

To build meaning.

AENEIS was born from this conviction.

I composed these works because I wished to rediscover a source.

A dimension of Pulchritude.

A beauty capable of orienting us.

A beauty that is not an escape from reality, but a deeper immersion into its truth.

For this reason, I chose a predominantly tonal language, expanded through electroacoustic elements that enter into dialogue with the orchestra.

For this reason, certain leitmotifs return throughout the work, accompanying the listener along the journey.

For this reason, every movement was conceived as a stage within a unified path.

The sixteen parts of AENEIS do not merely recount the story of Aeneas.

They tell of a search.

The search for an inner homeland.

For direction.

For light.

During those months of composition, many images accompanied me.

The architecture of Sant’Apollinare in Classe.

The delicate forms of Paul Klee.

The Folías de España performed by Jordi Savall.

I would walk while listening to that music, imagining the rhythm of the hexameters marking the cadence of my steps.

It felt as though distant worlds were speaking to one another.

Virgil.

Ancient music.

The contemporary orchestra.

Electronics.

The present.

The past.

Everything found its place within the same dialogue.

When I completed the final movement, I listened to the entire cycle from beginning to end.

I remember the sensation clearly.

It was not euphoria.

It was not relief.

It was fulfillment.

The feeling of having completed a journey.

As though a long conversation had finally reached its natural conclusion.

AENEIS is the result of that dialogue.

It does not seek to update Virgil.

It does not claim to reinterpret him definitively.

It simply seeks to listen.

And, through sound, to return a portion of the force his verses transmitted to me.

If this work carries a message, it is perhaps a simple one.

Beauty still exists.

Hope remains possible.

And within every human being there endures an inexhaustible capacity to rise again, to imagine, and to create.

Like Aeneas.

Always journeying onward.

Always facing toward a new land waiting to be founded.