Innamoramenti: Milko Merloni and Barbara Zanoni at Tapadum

Some evenings resist description. November 11 was one of them. Seven people came. Twenty-seven more had been thinking about it.

Milko Merloni and Barbara Zanoni brought Innamoramenti to Tapadum — a project that begins with love as its subject and uses love as its method.

What Innamoramenti Is

The title means fallings in love — plural, multiple, unexpected. Not the settled state of love but its onset: the moment before declaration, before certainty, when something is suspected but not yet named. Overwhelming or barely perceptible. Impossible and then suddenly manifest.

The project takes that quality — the innamoramento, the falling — and makes it a working method. Milko and Barbara do not plan a sound in advance. They begin from a personal resonance with a piece of music, perhaps distant in time or geography from their usual repertoire, and start by subtracting. They strip the material down to its skin. Then they weave a few essential threads around what remains, always leaving the original visible beneath — the way a transparent fabric reveals the body underneath without fully exposing it.

Sparse, uneven textures. Sometimes in counterpoint, sometimes unison. Always in dialogue with Barbara Zanoni’s contemporary dance, which is her first language — movement as co-composer, not illustration.

Voice, Body, and Instrument

• Milko Merloni — double bass, guitar, electric bass, voice
• Barbara Zanoni — body, voice

The instrument list on Milko’s side is deliberately wide — double bass, guitar, electric bass, voice — because the project requires different timbres for different material. The double bass carries the most weight: its low resonance beneath Barbara’s voice creates a space that feels physical, almost architectural.

Barbara Zanoni works at the intersection of dance, theatre, and music. Her body is not an accompaniment to the sound — it is part of the composition. In Innamoramenti, voice and movement are inseparable: she sings from inside the physical act of dancing, and the choreography shapes what the voice does.

Milko and Barbara have worked together since 2006 across music, theatre, and dance. Previous projects include ALMAWILD — a musical trio with Predrag Marić — Camille, a dance and music performance, and Sistole e Diastole, a theatrical work by Corrado Bertoni.

The Repertoire: Other People’s Music, Carefully Loved

The musical material in Innamoramenti comes primarily from other composers — pieces that Milko and Barbara have fallen in love with and then unmade, rebuilt, and made their own. A few original compositions by Milko Merloni sit alongside them, woven into the same fabric without announcing themselves as different.

The project does not aim to trace a path. It aims to germinate — upward from the ground, finding its shape through the process of falling itself, dependent on where beauty opens and where light catches it.

Francesco Benozzo’s line, which the duo carries as an epigraph, says it precisely: “And meanwhile among the threads of fire I saw dancing / An unexpected form for me / A form of the sea.”

An Evening Unlike the Others

Innamoramenti was the most formally unconventional evening in the Tapadum concert series to that point. No ethnic tradition, no defined geographic repertoire, no clear boundary between music and dance. What it shared with every other evening we had hosted was the quality of attention in the room — seven people who came to listen and watch, and two artists who gave them something that could not be replicated.

That is enough. That is, in fact, exactly enough.

Tapadum hosts concerts from across the musical spectrum. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.