On 4 September, at the Sala Ressi of the Teatro Galli, the Ensemble Micrologus performed Soave odor per l’universo spande — music from the San Gaudenzo III songbook, held at the State Archives of Rimini and long thought lost. In the 1500s the manuscript had been cut into strips and reused to reinforce the binding of a monastery’s account book.
Behind the recovery is the ERC LAUDARE project Team members, working with the ICPAL, which detached, cleaned and digitised each fragment. The LAUDARE team brought the codex virtually back to life: Zimei established the order of the strips and Giacomo Pirani realigned and reassembled them piece by piece, recovering 48 of the 110 original leaves and 85 secular compositions — 72 Italian, 13 French, 16 of them unique witnesses, including a ballata by Francesco Landini.
The day opened at 6 pm with Zimei presenting Rimini, MS San Gaudenzo III: The New Life of a Dismembered Songbook (Libreria Musicale Italiana, Ars Renovata), before the evening concert gave this repertoire its first modern performance — the music of the Malatesta court, in dialogue with Florence and with Franco-Flemish composers, sounding again in the city where it was written.
