La Piazza: It’s in there!

Jacopo Giacopuzzi’s first visit to Santa Barbara was just shy of 13 years ago. That was when the native of Verona, Italy, studied at the Music Academy of the West as a 2013 solo piano fellow with the legendary Jerome Lowenthal. He basically never left. 

As soon as he concluded his Masters in piano performance at USC Thornton, Giacopuzzi moved right back to town. 

“I thought it was the place where I had to be,” he said. 

A serial entrepreneur, Giacopuzzi has created all kinds of collaborative pairings of music and other fields, including in his day job as a realtor with Berkshire Hathaway in Montecito, just a stone’s throw from MAW’s Miraflores campus. 

His latest project in putting things together is a three-day event, April 10-12, when Santa Barbara Public Library’s new plaza and Faulkner Gallery transform into La Piazza for an Italian music, food, and culture festival. The idea was to connect his love of music and Santa Barbara with his longing for the sense of community that runs through his Italian blood. 

“From the moment I moved here, I felt a disconnect with Europe in terms of community and the way people connect,” Giacopuzzi said. “I realized I needed to import the sense of European lifestyle where people just naturally transition to a common place of the plaza and connect in a very genuine, natural way. They bond over passions about music and arts and food. It’s a light spirit that counters divisiveness, where you meet at the plaza and share ideas and have a good time.”

Giacopuzzi began by forming an Italian club that meets weekly and now boasts more than 160 members, and later started a series of events called Bistro Musicale, which were recitals that paired Italian menus and wines with performance pieces.  Attending the grand opening of the library’s new Towbes Plaza last year, he knew he’d found the perfect venue for expanding that formula into a communal gathering he called La Piazza. 

“It’s exactly what I envisioned for a festival, with a beautiful outdoor space downtown and a very accessible community room in Faulkner,” he said. 

Although it’s a new event, the comprehensive offerings over the weekend are impressive. On the musical menu, Friday’s concert at 4 pm is titled “Amore Italiano: Rome, Cinema, and the Music of the Heart,” pairing pianists Giacopuzzi and Alvise Pascucci with Camille Miller on violin and Tommaso Benciolini on flute for a program that starts with an adaptation of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” – performed just two weeks ago by the Santa Barbara Symphony – followed by excerpts of classic movie music with scenes projected on the walls of the gallery. Saturday afternoon’s concert, titled “Recomposed: Vivaldi, Verdi, and the Art of Reinvention,” features performances by Giacopuzzi, Benciolini and violinist Jessica Guideri, the symphony’s concertmaster playing adaptations of Vivaldi, Verdi and Nino Rota. Sunday’s closing concert brings pianist Antonio Artese and his West Coast Trio featuring bassist Luca Alemanno and drummer Mark Ferber, and flautist Benciolini to Faulkner for a rare performance of Claude Bolling’s “Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio.”

The festival’s gastronomic angle (italianate eats and demonstrations) takes place on Saturday and Sunday at Towbes Plaza, where visitors will enjoy bread and olive oil tastings, a fresh pasta stand, booths offering an array of authentic Italian products, cooking demonstrations and more. Cultural considerations will include hands-on workshops for kids, tarantella dance lessons, and seminars on the food, wine, and music of Italy presented by the UCSB Italian Culture Department; all celebrating Italy’s longstanding contributions to the American Riviera. Visitors will also be directed to festival partner restaurants, including Arnoldi’s, Aperitivo, Manifattura, Ca’ Dario, Olio, Bettina, Via Maestra 42, and more. 

I Madonnari is also getting involved, bringing a daily version of the street painting festival to Towbes Plaza, where kids can check out chalk drawings on the ground. There’ll even be board games, and bookmark-making in the shape of pizzas, and lots of opportunities to enjoy the plaza while chatting with friends old and new.

“It’s all Italian culture and fostering the sense of community,” Giacopuzzi said. “We want to reach out to all ages, old people and kids, so they can experience a little bit of Italy. Anything that connects people is part of the Italian lifestyle.” 

Visit https://lapiazza.life

All Artese, All the Time 

The Sunday “Dolce Swing” concert at La Piazza is among three already announced appearances for Antonio Artese in town over just four days in April. The pianist will also perform as part of his Music & Meditation Santa Barbara series at the Music Academy’s Weinman Hall on April 10 (see my Spirituality Matters column for more). Three days later he rejoins his West Coast Trio for his program New Horizons at SOhO on April 13. Expect an evening of sophisticated modern jazz that bridges the worlds of classical refinement and improvisational freedom through original compositions and interpretations of Great American Songbook standards.