ITALIAN ODYSSEY, AN EAR TO THE WIND.

By James Fassett '29. New York:Atheneum, 1969. 305 pp. $6.95.

This is a book not about seeing Italy but about hearing it. That is at once its virtue and its limitation. Jim Fassett is well known to all of us above a certain age from the years when he was the voice of the Philharmonic every Sunday afternoon. He is well acquainted with Italy and has done many music festival broadcasts for C.B.S. from that country and other European lands. This book recounts his wanderings about Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia with an ever-ready tape recorder in search of unusual or rarely recorded sound.

He finds such in generous measure. He is at his best when describing the actual songs and sounds and not when these are over- whelmed by accounts of festivals or special performances often put on in his honor. Of particular interest are descriptions of little known and perhaps never recorded patterns such as the chants of the Venetian "battipali," old men who used to drive by hand into the mud the piles on which Venice is now slowly sinking. Or the colorful account of the traditional cries of the "cavatori," the quarry workers at Carrara when they are moving huge blocks of marble. Or again the story of Mr. Fassett's finally successful attempt to record the actual sound of the flow of the fountains of Rome as celebrated by Resphigi.

Then, too, for a musician the accounts of visits to the birthplaces of Verdi, Puccini, and Toscannini are fascinating, although these sometimes lead into a plethora of detail. Yet such detail is sometimes fortunate as in the making of violins at Cremona.

Italian Odyssey is a book of interest to all who know Italy and of importance to those who want to know more about its musical traditions and personalities. But I must object to the constant peppering of its pages with Italian phrases, then preciously translated. Really, Jim! We know that you speak Italian fluently. Otherwise you could not have seen, heard, and recorded so much for us.

A former member of the Dartmouth faculty, a frequent traveller to Italy and resident of Norwich, Mr. Haile is a lecturer andauthor of The Eagle and the Bear.