The influence of the music by Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) on contemporaneous composers and on those who worked even between the seventeenth and eighteenth century was truly important. For the necessarily synthetic itinerary delineated in this CD I was inspired by four exemplary compositions excerpted from “Fiori Musicali”. This collection was printed in 1635. In it, the composer proposes works conceived for liturgical use (plus two pieces without a precise collocation within the Mass). These pieces are excerpted from the so-called “Messa della Madonna”, and are a Toccata avanti la Messa, Canzon dopo l’Epistola, Recercar dopo il Credo, Toccata per la Levatione. Here we can find all the elements which marked indelibly many musical works after Frescobaldi: the stylus phantasticus, his polyphonic expertise, the fascinating harmonic instability of the cross relations, his full mastery of Baroque rhetoric figures, and the feeling of ecstasy in the Toccate per l’Elevazione. This genre would be devoutly subsumed by Froberger; later, one has to admit, it remained unique. The Capriccio sopra La Sol Fa Re Mi, instead, is featured in the Primo libro dei Capricci, issued in Rome in 1624. The musical subject of the piece is described by the notes listed in its title. They are nothing else than a transformation of the expression “lascia fare a me” (“let me do it”), which seemingly was a typical answer of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. (Already Josquin Desprez had composed a Mass on that theme). The Toccata VII by Michelangelo Rossi (1601/1602-1656) seems, instead, to perfectly embody a line by poet Giambattista Marino: “È del poeta il fin la meraviglia” (“wonder is the poet’s aim”). In our case, the composer displays a writing style with great variety, with sections juxtaposed to each other following the criterium of contrast. In the exordium we hear small tremoletti written in full over a long harmonic pedal. The second section irrupts decidedly with a more dynamic figuration, which is interrupted by unexpectedly passing from an E-flat chord to an E-major chord. The protagonists of what comes after are instead the intervals of descending minor third. They follow each other, exploring the keyboard’s full range. After a more reflective section, rich in scales and passi doppi (i.e. “double steps”), the concluding part unfolds over chromatic movements of an extreme audacity, with contrary and parallel motions, generating harmonic successions which are truly unheard-of (and are particularly emphasised by the temperament of the Ferrarese instrument played here).