Poet, composer, journalist, author and Italian director, Benito MERLINO
was born in Filicudi, a small Sicilian island in the province of Messina, which he dedicates himself to cultivate the ethnological memory as well as the myths and legends.
His father, a medical doctor, his mother, an Uruguayan from Montevideo. He spends his childhood in the Aeolian Islands, and studies economics at the University of Messina where in reality his only passion is for poets, literature and music.
He makes about thirty records. Engaged songs ? Yes, provided not to confuse commitment and political activism.
An anarchist ? Yes, if anarchism is still – as it was at the beginning – love for the human race, hunger for justice as if it were bread, choice of the party of the underdog.
He contributes to various documentaries for the « Thalassa”, a show on France 3. He writes musics for movies, and brings the “Song of Roland”, and the Carolingians legends back to France, which had spent eight centuries in Sicily as traditional puppets. He brings them back as a TV show on Antenne 2, “The Paladins of France”, of which he is responsible for the music, the texts and the staging.
He translates Italian authors at Christian Bourgois. He published La Harpe éolienne with editions « Alteredit »; a biography of Federico Fellini and a novel, Une Enfance éolienne, at Gallimard ; Îles Vagantes, a novel at the Harmattan.