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Sense of Place: This Roman record label works to preserve 'B movie' scores

The original soundtrack to the 1973 film Rivelazioni Di Uno Psichiatra Sul Mondo Perverso Del Sesso
Miguel Perez/WXPN
The original soundtrack to the 1973 film Rivelazioni Di Uno Psichiatra Sul Mondo Perverso Del Sesso

Walking through the streets of Rome, it's obvious that the Eternal City takes its history seriously. Remnants of the past are immaculately preserved wherever you go, including one of the stops in our latest Sense of Place series.

Four Flies Records is a label devoted to preserving and releasing old soundtracks from Italian B movies — low-budget films originally screened as the lesser-known half of a double feature during the early 20th century.

In this session, founder Pier de Sanctis talks about how he fell in love with B movies, what makes their scores so special, and about the particular challenge he faced when he started Four Flies Records.

"I realized very soon that the majority of this music was lost forever because the publisher at the time didn't believe in preservation," he says.

You'll also hear how he found one of those soundtracks he thought had been lost forever.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).