Le Orme

Le Orme were born in the industrial heart of Venice, in Marghera, where the noise of factories mixed with that of guitars. They were no ordinary band: they were four young men seeking something more than playing covers in trendy venues. Nino Smeraldi, the guitarist, and Aldo Tagliapietra, a twenty-one-year-old Muranese who had just won a singer-songwriter contest, decided to form their own group. With Claudio Galieti on bass and Marino Rebeschini on drums, the quartet auditioned for Emi but were rejected. That didn’t stop them: in 1967, they recorded a single, Fiori e colori, and released it in English as Flowers and Colours, following the fashion of the time. But the name they initially chose, Le Ombre, in honor of the Shadows, didn’t last long: the Venetian word “ombra” also means “wine glass,” and another group in the region already had that name. So they settled on Le Orme, a wordplay that, unintentionally, defined their style: between the classical and the modern, like a trail that leaves a mark.

The breakthrough came when Rebeschini left the band due to military conscription and was replaced by Michi Dei Rossi, a drummer who had come from the Hopopi, the strongest band in the local scene and which had participated in the Liverpool Beat Festival as guests of Los Bravos. With him on percussion, the group gained strength on stage, especially at Rome’s Piper, a place where Italian rock was beginning to take shape. In 1968, they released Senti l'estate che torna —and its English version, Summer Comin'— for the Un disco per l'estate contest. By then, they had already added Tony Pagliuca, a keyboardist and former leader of the Hopopi, who brought a different vision: the keys would no longer be just an ornament but the heart of their sound. That year, they recorded Ad gloriam, an album they knew wouldn’t sell much (“we did it for glory,” they said), but which allowed them to break free from CAR Juke Box and leave the beat scene behind forever. The music became more complex, more ambitious, as if they were searching for a path that didn’t yet exist.