Roberta Gulisano‘s songs begin in Sicilian dialect and in the daily life of a small town in the province of Enna, where folk tales, village poetry and family memories still shape how people speak to one another. Her latest EP A Ccu Apparteni?, released in 2024 by Mhodí Music Company, takes that local world and rewrites it from the vantage point of a migrant who has spent nine years in England, asking what remains when a person carries one culture inside another.

The title comes from a common expression in Sicily and across southern Italy, a question used to place a stranger inside a network of kin and community. “A ccu apparteni doesn’t mean where do you come from, but who do you belong to,” she explained. “And this changes the perspective. Your being is not linked to a place, but it is linked to something that is in the blood. Your ancestry, your culture, your roots.” For her, that shift from geography to lineage has become central to her writing, especially since moving to a country where children grow up speaking several languages and the usual questions about origin often fall short.

When we met her at WOMEX, the annual Worldwide Music Expo for global and folk music professionals, in Tampere, Finland, in late October, she spoke about A Ccu Apparteni? as a way of tracing that line back through her own life. The EP, which in October 2025 entered the Top Ten of the World Music Charts Europe, gathers material she first touched as a teenager in high school folk clubs, dancing tarantellas and counter-dances with what became Compagnia Triskele, and the stories she learnt from figures like the accordion player known as ‘Zio Angelo’ and the Stornelli alla Leonfortese singers of Leonforte. It also carries the harmonic work that followed in Palermo, where jazz studies at the “V. Bellini” Conservatory pushed her towards composition.

Her position, belonging to Sicily but also to a future outside it, is shaped by the island’s uneasy history with dialect and folk music. For many years, both were treated as evidence of social decline rather than cultural wealth. “Sicily has a particular history, a particular relationship with its folk and its dialect, because for many years both the dialect and the traditional music have been abandoned as a sign of a social downfall,” she said. The pressure reached into domestic life. “I come from a generation where it was almost forbidden to speak the dialect at home, because it was not a good custom.” Instruments, dances and songs were pushed towards staged folklore and tourism instead of community practice. “They have been more connected to the world of folklore, of the revival for tourism, rather than for the community.”

Her own entry into that world came through school. “It all started at high school.” An afternoon club was proposed by a mother who collaborated with the school, and a group of classmates invited her in. “We started with classmates, friends, they brought me in. I was a very shy girl, you wouldn’t say, 12–13 years old.” They began with dances. “We started with the dances, tarantellas, counter-dances, etc. And it became for me, being a very shy girl, a way to express myself, to have fun, to make community with my classmates.”

At the end of school, they formalised what they had built. “At the end of school we founded an association with the help of some parents, because obviously we needed it.” The group grew into Compagnia Triskele, working with festivals and schools. She remained primarily a dancer at first. “Obviously I was always passionate about singing, I sang, but in reality I was mostly a dancer in the group.”

An older accordion player, known to everyone as Zio Angelo, became a key figure in those early years. “There was an old man who played the accordion, who also taught us several songs, so he performed with us and it was very nice. His name was Zio Angelo, which I actually quote from a verse of a song in this album.” That song points directly to the Stornelli alla Leonfortese tradition from Leonforte, in her home province of Enna. “They have this way of singing accompanied by the accordion, with a very precise structure, a very precise melody. But the Stornelli are generally improvised.”

She sketches their role with affection. “Generally they are jocose Stornelli, of disdain or love. Some obviously have sexual references, some make fun of each other.” The practice fits into a wider southern culture of singing face to face. “The tradition of the Stornelli is a bit in the south of Italy, the singing in front.” Within that, some rules still hold. “Generally the initial Stornello is always the same, that is, the singing always begins with the same incipit and then changes according to the genius of the singer.”

Singing as a central activity came later, pushed forward by necessity at a particular event where the lead singer fell ill. “I remember there was a particular event where, as for many singers, the singer in turn got sick and we had to perform. They told me, okay, you sing it, you know how to sing it. I said ok.” Until then, her solo experience had been limited. “They sang the choir of the church, but not as a soloist.” That night changed something. “And then I started to say, well, I like to perform even alone in front of a stage.” Lessons followed.

Looking back, she insists this was not the plan. “If you had told me at 16, 17 years old to do this, no.” At school she was on a different track. “I studied at the scientific high school, I wanted to do chemistry.” The folk group defined her social circle. “My friends, my circle of friends were those there, but I have to say that within the city community, obviously, we were a bit… we were a bit of freaks, those strange ones, but we had a lot of fun, we did really nice things, we travelled a lot.” She counts that as good fortune. “I think that, considering the age and the years in which we grew up, we were very lucky to have these opportunities.”

University took her to Palermo, where her world widened again. “Then I went to university, I moved to Palermo, I got in touch with the musical scene in Palermo, I started studying there.” She later enrolled at the “V. Bellini” Conservatory and chose jazz. “Then I went to the conservatory, I studied jazz, so a completely different world, but always with grassroots connections. From the point of view of composition I started to compose my own things.” Her first fully structured song, “Mennula Amara”, arrived in 2008 and would later appear on her second album. “The first song was Mennula Amara and it’s on my second album, Piena di(s)grazia. The year was 2008. The first version of that song is not very different, it is a bit different from the one that went on the album, but that is the first song in absolute, structured.”

The way she deals with material has been consistent from the start. She treats songs as stories with histories, not just texts to be reused. “I have never been satisfied with taking a text or a song that I knew. I have a passion for stories, so I like to understand what is behind a song, the life, the story that exists, the culture that exists, why it came to us and also why it didn’t come to us.” She mentions lyrics preserved in collections by Favara and Salamone Marino, where the words survive but the music is gone. “I managed to collect the lyrics, but sometimes the music was lost, it was not recorded.” For her, that loss is tied to broader history. “In the misfortune of Sicily as a history, during fascism there was a big moment of flattening, of cleaning, of Italianness, so this did not help.” Yet geography and temperament still protected something. “However, the geography of Sicily and perhaps also the reticence of the Sicilians to news in general, however, something has always preserved it, something has managed to arrive until our days.”

Her own growth coincided with a wider surge in Sicilian-language songwriting. “In the years I started, there was a big revival of Sicilian music. Many songwriters started writing in Sicilian, many bands were born, some survived, some got a little lost, but I think there is still a lot of value in the Sicilian music that derives from that path.” In 2010 Compagnia Triskele won the Premio Andrea Parodi with “Fimmini”, one of Italy’s key awards dedicated to world and folk music. Her first solo album Destini Coatti, released in 2012 and inspired by Sicilian writer Goliarda Sapienza’s work, was selected for the Opera Prima section at Premio Tenco, the country’s most influential songwriting prize. She is also a two-time winner of the Bianca D’Aponte Award for Best Lyrics (2010 and 2012), an Italian prize for women songwriters with a strong focus on text and voice. Her 2016 follow-up Piena di(s)grazia, produced by Catania-born songwriter and producer Cesare Basile, whose career spans independent rock, experimental projects and Sicilian folk traditions, opened into further collaboration, with Gulisano later joining his line-up as backing vocalist and percussionist.

Known to many listeners as “La Guli”, she has taken her songs to stages such as European Jazz Expo, Taranta Fest, Alkantara Fest and Capo d’Orlando Blues, carrying Sicilian dialect into jazz, rock and folk contexts.

By the time she arrived in England in 2016, after Piena di(s)grazia, those experiences were part of a life that suddenly fell quiet. “I stopped making music, I dedicated myself more to my family, to work, and also to training in a new society,” she recalled. The pause lasted long enough to unsettle her. “At a certain point I felt a bit lost. I was spiritually lost.” The way back, she realised, meant returning to the moment before everything shifted. “I thought, ok, maybe I have to go back to where I left my journey, and for me going back to where I left my journey is going back to before my transfer to the UK, where my life has changed logistically.”

She describes that decision through an image that stays close to her home landscape. “I have always painted this moment in my life as if I had planted a lemon tree in a different land. So the roots are still there. The roots are still there, but the tree was struggling to bloom. So I needed to put the right fertiliser, to create the right atmosphere for this tree to bloom in a different land. And I think I succeeded.” Going back meant opening what she calls an old box: folk material, traditional texts, memories, instruments and the dialect that had been pushed to the margins when she was a child.

The record became a form of self-recognition. She began by looking at the objects she had physically carried with her from Sicily, small things with no financial value that kept particular lives present. “So, I also took back some of the objects that are in the video, of who I belong to. They are objects that I have carried with me, even stupid objects, that do not have a monetary value in themselves, but that remind me of things.” Then she names them. “My grandfather’s broken clock, my mother’s lighter, these things that tell you, ok, but why did I bring them with me? Well, because they remind me of the pieces of my life.” Those items appear in the video for “A Ccu Apparteni?” as anchors, linking the title question to real people and histories behind it.

The album, she says, helped rebuild an inner map. “It was the album. The album for me was a path of recognition.” She sees it as protection against the temptation to cling to flags instead of stories. “Speaking of what is happening now in England, probably if you feel lost, you are more inclined to take flags, to recognise yourself in a flag, rather than in a strong story that is inside you, that you can share with others.” Her conclusion holds both sides of her life together. “So I certainly belong to Sicily, but I also belong to a future that is probably outside Sicily. And I embrace it gladly.”

The recording of A Ccu Apparteni? in October 2022 brought several parts of her world into one room. Cesare Basile handled arrangements and recording direction. “We recorded the album in three.” Alongside her voice, frame drums, keyboards and castanets, Basile contributed guitars, electronics and a range of Mediterranean instruments, while Giorgio Maltese brought reed flutes, frame drums, mandolin, marranzani (jaw harps), bagpipes and accordion. “Giorgio Maltese, who recorded with me and is on tour, we do the live together. Giorgio is a great researcher, first of all, and then he plays the mandolin, the marranzano, tamburelli, flutes, and it’s in the last album.”

On stage, the trio format continues, with Basile replaced by Palermo-based multi-instrumentalist MichelePiccione, turning A Ccu Apparteni? into what she describes as “songs for the uprooted”, where ritual rhythms, distorted timbres and close interaction with the audience keep the question of belonging in constant motion. “Cesare is replaced by Michele Piccione. He is also a multi-instrumentalist from Palermo, and a great scholar too. It’s nice to have two great scholars of tradition, who also embraced the instruments to give them a new shape.” In Britain she is joined by Venezuelan guitarist Lucho Brunicardi. “At the moment I am collaborating with a Venezuelan guitarist. His name is Lucho Brunicardi. He also embraced the project, so he supports me in British territory.”

The repertoire on A Ccu Apparteni? mixes rearranged traditional songs and originals. Her method with older material follows the same pattern as her work on texts. “I try to bring them to my experience, I try to interpret them, to know their context, where they came from, to understand the context of today, the emotions around us.” Before she makes her own version, she usually listens widely. “I usually listen to different versions, if there are available versions.” Then she gives herself room. “But then I tend to throw myself in a free style.”

In England, she introduces her concerts by naming the language barrier and then refusing to accept it as a wall. “When I present my concerts to the British public, I say that even if they don’t understand the words, there is a meaning in the sound that every language has.” For her, each dialect carries sound shaped by long histories. “I think that every language, every dialect in itself, especially as a singer, has a sound that goes back thousands of years of culture. And this sound, perhaps in an archaic way, reaches the audience.”

Her sense of how this work lands outside Italy has formed slowly, through gigs, conversations and time. She talks about English audiences with real respect. “The English listener is a trained ear, and a curious ear.” The difficulties, she feels, lie more with the system around them. “There’s more hostility from bookings and venues to unknown things. And I understand that, so let’s see if we can break through.” In recent years she has stepped into small English folk circuits that feel very focused and committed. “It’s a completely different world. Let’s say that I have now started to discover the world of folk music in England, and these are niches, but very, very full of people who play and record English folk music and a bit of Balfolk, including repertoires from the communities of Brittany.” That experience has not changed her overall view of the wider industry, which remains cautious. “As far as I understood so far, there’s not a lot of openness to the Southern European, Mediterranean scene. There’s a rather closed market, despite the fact that, in my opinion, there’s potential.”

Against that backdrop, WOMEX became a place to talk about where the project could go next as much as where it had come from. “We hope that this WOMEX creates good connections for the next years, for a few festivals in Europe.” She and her collaborators are already thinking about the next chapter. “We are starting to lay the foundations for an A Ccu Apparteni? 2.0, which was already an initial project when it was supposed to be a double album. There are no songs yet, but we already have a lot of traditional songs to rearrange and give a new shape. Let’s see what happens in the studio, because you never know.”

There are other wishes, too. She lights up when she talks about Cuban music. “I love Cuban music. My dream is to spend a year in Cuba, to learn… I don’t know, it just rings in my strings, it seems strange, but it excites me, it makes me move, there is always that relationship with music and dance, which is always there.” That connection between voice and movement has been present since her very first folk dance classes in Enna and runs underneath everything she does now.

Asked how she would introduce her music to someone who has never heard it, she pauses. “I try to create new traditions. I take my tradition and I try to bring it to the generation I belong to. 2025 is a generation of people born between the 80s and 90s, who travelled and returned, and are passionate about things that don’t belong to them, and make them their own. A mix, a crossover between the past and the present.” It is an answer that holds Sicily, England and the title of her EP in one frame: not where you come from, but who you belong to, and what you carry forward.

You can listen to and purchase your copy of A Ccu Apparteni? via Bandcamp
and follow Roberta Gulisano through her Facebook page

Photo ©: Orazio Sturniolo / ExpOZure_photograpy