Book presentation with Giuliano Budden. 

January 1909: a twenty-three-year-old maid dies after weeks of public accusations. Not a single word written in her own hand survives—only a judicial file. And, in this book, fifteen phonograph cylinders never catalogued elsewhere.

An alternate history inspired by the Puccini collections of the State Library of Lucca: a small deviation in the biography of Giacomo Puccini, precisely at the point where the documents end and silence begins. Letters, recordings, testimonies and archival materials intertwine research and imagination to fill that void, revealing lesser-known aspects of the Maestro’s world.

The secret is uncovered by Giuliano Budden—musicologist, archivist and scholar of historical sound recording—who authors this enigmatic volume, poised between trompe-l’œil, investigative journalism and the hallucinations of archival sources.

Curated by Guido Segni

Giuliano Budden (Milan, 1955) is a musicologist, archivist, and essayist. He taught Music History and Source Criticism at the University of Brescia-Valcamonica, with a break in his academic activity between 1989 and 1992. He collaborated with the Italian Centre for Musical Documentation in Bologna and with the European Institute for Phonographic Studies in Geneva, where he conducted research into signal alteration phenomena in early twentieth-century wax-cylinder recordings.

His research focuses on Italian opera between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to hidden creative processes, private correspondence, and the earliest sound testimonies of cylinder phonography, whose ability to preserve “not only sound, but the threshold before sound” he has frequently highlighted in academic conferences.

He has edited critical editions of previously unpublished correspondence and contributed to collective volumes on the reception of Puccini’s operas in Europe. He occasionally collaborates with private archives and artists’ families in the recovery and preservation of materials not originally intended for publication.

DORIA: Letters, Cylinders and Transmissions from the Impossible Archive is his first work of narrative writing—a choice, as he himself declares, imposed by the materials themselves.