Ironically enough, musical genius Frank Zappa and a 13th century poet, Cielo d’Alcamo, had some important things in common. These artists so vastly disparate in time and space share an iconoclastic spirit and the colors of two neighboring cities in northwest Sicily.
The audacious American rocker, who blazed his own trail across genres and eras like no-one else, had a delightfully irreverent sense of humor, a trait that also belonged to one of the most well-known poets of the Sicilian poetry school. It was Cielo or Ciullo d’Alcamo who left us one of the earliest Italian poems, Rosa fresca aulentissima (fresh, fragrant rose), a lively amorous dialogue in 31 stanzas.
