… Radio has in no way replaced orchestras in the cafés. Here every café, restaurant or confectioner’s has its orchestra, always good, often numerous; quite a few premises on several floors have two or three. I have never heard a radio in a café! Nor can it be said that this is for reasons of profit, because here the Italian “supplement for the orchestra” does not exist. On the other hand I have been in one café (Trumpf) from which they were transmitting, and I can give you a brief account so that you may relive the scene, as you hear, with your eyes too. A hall as large as the canopy of Palermo’s Central Station — divided however by convenient stairways, landings and recesses in such a way as to eliminate this idea of overwhelming grandeur. It is covered in green marble streaked with red up to the waist, and above that in encaustic tiling of a lighter green with golden spangles. Ceiling of smooth gold. All around there is a wooden colonnade, also green. Nebuchadnezzar’s dining room. In the middle, an open space for couples to dance in. A wall entirely of glass reveals Kurfürstendamm, its myriad lights, its crazy traffic, the incredible rain. In one corner, microphones at their noses, the orchestra: 15 men and women wearing - in contrast with the solemnity of the hall — peach-coloured shirts, soft collars, black ties and champagne trousers (or skirts). They play admirably — in a rounded, warm and melting tonality – the ‘Blue Danube’ at least twice an evening. After every piece, ecstatic applause. Sometimes the cellist (yes, he), without getting up, sings short pieces of song in a baritone voice. The current craze is ‘Ich bin ganz für Liebe aufgemacht’ [‘I am all ready for love’]. The audience “jauchzt, jubelt, klappert, wird tollwütig” [‘exults, rejoices, claps, goes wild’]. He does not even thank them: he sings the song again. (You should know that it is very fashionable to interrupt the music so that the violins may do imitations of birdsong, which you, down there in the Island of Fire, would take for nightingales.) << less