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

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 the first stop 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.