** First-ever 24Bit/192kHz remaster from the original tapes. 180g black vinyl, numbered, in a gatefold die-cut sleeve faithful to the 1973 original** Some records define an era. Io Sono Nato Libero is one of them - and perhaps, within the entire canon of Italian progressive rock, the one most resistant to any replica. December 1973. Banco del Mutuo Soccorso - the Rome-based group led by brothers Vittorio and Gianni Nocenzi, alongside vocalist Francesco Di Giacomo, guitarist Marcello Todaro, bassist Renato D'Angelo, and drummer Pier Luigi Calderoni - releases its third album in less than two years, closing an opening trilogy that stands without equal in the history of Rock Progressivo Italiano. After the 1972 self-titled debut and the concept album Darwin!, Banco does not seek to consolidate what it has already achieved. It goes further. The album abandons the cosmic allegories of its predecessors and turns toward the real world - politics, the body, freedom as moral urgency. It does so in the year of the Chilean coup, and you can feel it.

The heart of the album is "Canto Nomade Per Un Prigioniero Politico" - fifteen minutes and forty-three seconds that open the record like a fissure splitting open in the earth. Vittorio Nocenzi builds organ and synthesizer architectures that carry structural weight worthy of Bartók or early Emerson, while his brother Gianni answers at the piano with a fluency that moves between classical music and jazz without settling long in either. Di Giacomo sings at the edge of breaking - a voice dense and metallic, capable of carrying the despair of a political prisoner without ever collapsing into the theatrical. Then the track splinters into tribal percussion driven by guest musicians, before finding coherence again in a closing acoustic passage of rare delicacy. It is a composition that seems impossible to contain on a single side of an LP.

The rest of the album proves that Banco does not exhaust itself in the epic. "Non Mi Rompete" is its precise opposite - five minutes of acoustic ballad, guitar and voice, which with a disarming simplicity became the band's most beloved song, remaining in the live set for decades. "La Città Sottile", composed by Gianni Nocenzi, anticipates by forty years the anxieties of urban modernity. "Dopo... Niente È Più Lo Stesso" returns the band to symphonic grandeur, synthesizers detuning like falling objects before being lifted again by the piano. "Traccia II" closes in near-chamber form, a classical epilogue that echoes the closing theme of the band's debut. Five tracks. Not a gram of filler.

In 2015, Rolling Stone placed Io Sono Nato Libero at number 35 on its list of the 50 greatest prog albums of all time - a belated acknowledgment of what devoted listeners had always known. Alongside the early records of PFM and Le Orme, the album mapped the coordinates of a distinctly European way of making rock music, one that had no need to look toward Canterbury or London to find its own authority. Sony Italia now returns it to circulation in an edition that gets things right. Audio remastered at 24Bit/192kHz from the original tapes - the most honest way to give the tape back its voice. Limited edition 180-gram black vinyl, individually numbered, with a gatefold sleeve reproducing the die-cut design of the original 1973 Ricordi pressing, and an eight-page booklet restoring all imagery from the first edition. The die-cut cover was, and remains, an object in its own right - a visual statement that few labels permitted themselves in that year.