COME IN UN'ULTIMA CENA

As in a Last Supper: Chronicle of a Generation at the Twilight of Ideals

Introduction: A Personal Banquet in the Years of Lead

Picture, if you will, a young boy stepping through the doorway of a record shop in 1976, that threshold between childhood and understanding, fingering through the vinyl sleeves until one stops him cold: "Come in un'ultima cena." This was no mere purchase; it was an unconscious act of archaeology, the acquisition of what would become a Rosetta Stone for decoding the wounded zeitgeist of an entire epoch. That first vinyl, that private initiation, now serves as a skeleton key unlocking chambers of collective memory far larger than any one boy's adolescence.

"Come in un'ultima cena" stands as more than the fifth studio offering from one of Italy's progressive rock titans. Here was an artistic manifesto carved in wax, a moment when Banco del Mutuo Soccorso shed their baroque plumage to stare unblinking at a nation eating itself alive. The album reimagines that most sacred of suppers as a secular wake, a parable for idealists watching their dreams curdle into something unrecognizable. These pages seek to excavate the historical crucible that forged this work, to dissect its musical anatomy with the precision of a watchmaker, to hold each track up to the light like a fragment of stained glass, and finally, to contemplate why its resonance refuses to fade, like a bell still ringing in an empty church.

Chapter I: The Uneasy Table - Italy's Fever Dream of 1976.

To grasp what "Come in un'ultima cena" truly represents, one must first descend into the schizophrenic fever dream that was mid-seventies Italy, a country simultaneously giving birth and administering last rites to itself.

The Weight of Lead:

By 1976, Italy had become a nation where breakfast came with body counts. The so-called "Years of Lead", that metallic taste in the mouth of history, had reached their terrible crescendo. From one corner came the black terror of neo-fascist bombs, those apostles of chaos who'd been planting their deadly seeds since Piazza Fontana in '69, believers in the "strategy of tension" that sought to frighten democracy into authoritarianism's embrace. From the other corner, the Red Brigades and their ilk, revolutionary romantics turned executioners, their manifestos written increasingly in blood rather than ink. This wasn't some distant thunder rolling through newspaper headlines; it was the weather itself. Fear had become atmospheric, as pervasive as humidity before a storm. Democracy seemed paralyzed, a deer caught in history's headlights. The beautiful dreamers of '68 watched their utopias metastasize into something monstrous, some turned to bullets, others to heroin, most to a kind of numb bewilderment. This is the emotional frequency the album captures: not rage, but the exhaustion that comes after rage has burned itself out.

A Nation Giving Birth While Dying:

Yet to paint Italy purely in shades of darkness would be to miss half the picture, perhaps the more astonishing half. Like a patient experiencing both fever and euphoria, the very same Italy was simultaneously undergoing a Renaissance of social progress. Universal healthcare bloomed from legislative soil. Women gained equality under family law. Divorce became legal despite the Vatican's protests. Workers won rights that would have seemed fantastical a generation earlier. The streets that ran with blood also filled with feminists, ecologists, reformers, a carnival of progressive possibility. This cognitive dissonance, this sensation of living simultaneously in apocalypse and renaissance, forms the album's emotional core. Banco didn't simply document the darkness or celebrate the light; they captured that vertiginous feeling of existing between worlds. The dinner guests at their allegorical table aren't mere characters but living contradictions, each one a fragment of a society trying to be born while convinced it was dying. The album becomes a seismograph recording not just political tremors but the soul-quakes of an entire generation.

Chapter II: A New Testament - The Sound of Metamorphosis.

Banco's response to this historical delirium was neither retreat nor revolution, but something more subtle: a deliberate evolution that proved artistic maturity isn't measured in minutes or movements, but in the courage to speak plainly when the times demand clarity. Under Manticore's Wing By 1976, Banco had transcended their peninsular origins. Manticore Records, the brainchild of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, had become their gateway to the world, positioning them alongside PFM and Le Orme in progressive rock's Mediterranean trinity. The album even spawned an English doppelganger, "As in a Last Supper," with Angelo Branduardi serving as linguistic midwife. This wasn't provincialism; this was a Roman band speaking in tongues the whole world could understand.

From Symphonies to Snapshots:

The album's most radical gesture was its abandonment of sprawl. Gone were the twenty-minute odysseys of their earlier work, those baroque cathedrals of sound that had made their reputation. In their place: nine focused meditations, with even the longest, "Slogan," barely breaking the seven-minute mark. Some critics smelled commercial compromise, a genuflection to the emerging punk ethos that viewed prog's excesses as musical obesity. But this interpretation misses the artistic intelligence at work. Like a poet discovering the haiku after years of writing epics, Banco had learned that compression can be its own form of complexity. In an era when both punk's three-chord manifestos and disco's mechanical heartbeat were assassinating prog's reputation, the ability to distill without diluting was survival through adaptation. Moreover, the album's concept demanded this structure: if each song was a dinner guest's monologue, then concision became dramaturgical necessity. The genius lay in making artistic evolution and narrative requirement coincide so perfectly that one couldn't exist without the other.

Chapter III: The Parable of the Diners - Anatomy of Disillusionment.

At its heart, the album operates as an elaborate metaphor, a passion play where political betrayal substitutes for religious treachery, and communion wine tastes suspiciously of bitter herbs.

Dinner as Theater:

The album cover, Cesare Monti's visual overture, immediately signals we're entering theatrical rather than liturgical space. This isn't Leonardo's Last Supper but something more Beckettian, figures frozen in a tableau that's simultaneously sacred and absurd. Da Vinci's fresco captured the apostles' individual psychological earthquakes at Christ's announcement of betrayal. Banco's album performs a similar operation but on a sociological scale: these are the poses a generation strikes when told their revolution has been canceled due to lack of interest.

The Cast of Characters:

Each track introduces another archetype slouching toward this Bethlehem of disillusionment. Di Giacomo and Nocenzi's lyrics abandon their former mythological grandeur for something more intimate and bitter, the poetry of hangovers rather than intoxication. "Il ragno" (The Spider) spins webs of cynical opportunism. "Giovanni" offers love like a child offering dandelions to cure cancer. "Slogan" still believes in the revolution but his voice cracks with doubt. The brilliance lies in how the biblical framework elevates generational disillusionment to the status of spiritual crisis. The betrayal haunting this table isn't Judas's kiss but something more diffuse, the thousand small treacheries that transformed the '68 generation's wine into vinegar. By invoking the Last Supper, Banco suggests that political disappointment can be its own form of spiritual death, that losing faith in revolution might be as profound as losing faith in resurrection.

Chapter IV: The Courses of the Dinner - A Track-by-Track Séance.

Each song deserves examination like a specimen under glass, not to pin it down but to appreciate its particular wings.

1. A cena, per esempio

The opening doesn't so much begin as materialize, like fog condensing into form. Di Giacomo confesses exhaustion with the weariness of a night-shift worker: "I've extinguished the last fire to give my eyes rest... but earth's cry still whips my heart." This is the host's welcome speech, admitting his own emptiness while begging his guests to fill it. Nocenzi's keyboards and Maltese's guitar interweave like smoke and light, creating an atmosphere of elegant unease.

2. Il ragno

Enter the spider, capitalism's sociopath, revolution's undertaker. The music turns predatory, Nocenzi's keyboards stabbing while Maltese's guitar slashes. "I spin... I concede nothing, ever, to anyone." Here's the winner in chaos's lottery, the one who profits from everyone else's confusion. The rhythm section, Calderoni's drums and D'Angelo's bass, doesn't accompany so much as hunt. This is prog rock with blood under its fingernails.

3. È così buono Giovanni, ma...

The album's "pop" moment arrives dressed in sheep's clothing. Giovanni loves purely but pointlessly, a saint in a world that's forgotten what holiness means. The acoustic guitar and piano create a lullaby for adults who've forgotten how to sleep. It's a critique wrapped in a caress, sometimes good intentions are just another form of narcissism.

4. Slogan

The album's epic struggles to contain itself at seven minutes. This is the activist's aria, all passionate intensity and secret doubt. The band unleashes its full arsenal, time signatures colliding, dynamics exploding and imploding, instruments arguing like a family at Christmas. It's brilliant and exhausting, like watching someone trying to restart a dead engine through sheer will.

5. Si dice che i delfini parlino

Now comes the mystic's escape hatch. Branduardi's violin doesn't play notes so much as paint auroras. The synthesizers drift like thoughts during meditation. Originally conceived for an unfinished opera about St. Francis, the track finds new meaning here, when reality becomes unbearable, perhaps dolphins really do have the answers.

6. Voilà Mida (Il guaritore)

The false prophet arrives with jazz in his pockets and snake oil in his briefcase. The opening sounds like a seduction, but the second half reveals the con. Di Giacomo's voice goes full theater, exposing the charlatan behind the charm. Maltese's guitar work flows like expensive wine that leaves a bitter aftertaste.

7. Quando la buona gente dice

Two minutes of medieval judgment, the chorus of conformity dispensing wisdom nobody asked for. The trumpet sounds like a town crier announcing regulations for proper living. It's a miniature masterpiece of social observation, sometimes the most dangerous people are the ones who "only want what's best for you."

8. La notte è piena

A rare moment of unguarded tenderness, like finding a love letter in a war zone. Branduardi's violin returns to remind us that beauty persists despite everything. This is the album's emotional pressure valve, suggesting that even in history's darkest moments, two people can still find each other in the dark.

9. Fino alla mia porta

The finale doesn't conclude so much as ascend, Nocenzi's synthesizer building a stairway to acceptance rather than heaven. After all the voices, all the positions, all the poses, what remains is a solitary figure walking home alone but somehow not defeated. Di Giacomo's voice carries the weight of experience without bitterness, the difference between giving up and letting go.

Conclusion: A Resurrection of Memory:

"Come in un'ultima cena" endures because it captured something more precise than history and more permanent than politics, it caught a generation in the act of growing up, that precise moment when idealism doesn't die but transforms into something more complex and perhaps more valuable: wisdom.

That young boy in the record shop, choosing his first album in 1976, was unknowingly selecting a companion for life. The affection that remains isn't nostalgia but recognition, this album told the truth when truth was unfashionable, offered complexity when simplicity was trending, chose melancholy over either rage or submission.

In the end, "Come in un'ultima cena" succeeds because it dared to be transitional in the deepest sense, not just musically but philosophically. It's the sound of a generation learning that growing up doesn't mean abandoning your ideals but understanding their true cost.

The album remains forever at that table, waiting for each new listener to pull up a chair and break bread with their own beautiful failures. In that sense, every listening is both a last supper and a first communion, an ending that insists on also being a beginning.

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