© 2025 KSUT Public Radio
NPR News and Music Discovery for the Four Corners
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Sense of Place: Finger-style guitar is king at this Tuscan music venue

Fabrizio Bianco, the son of Six Bars Jail founder Sergio Bianco, performs during a World Cafe session at the venue in Serpiolle, Italy.
Patrizia Messeri
/
Courtesy of Six Bars Jail
Fabrizio Bianco, the son of Six Bars Jail founder Sergio Bianco, performs during a World Cafe session at the venue in Serpiolle, Italy.

You're taking a summer vacation in Italy this week with our Sense of Place: Rome series, exploring the music scene there. Today, it's a quick day trip to Tuscany to visit Six Bars Jail, a tiny club just outside Florence devoted to finger-style guitar.

Sergio Bianco is one of the venue's founders, who named the club after a song by guitarist Giovanni Unterberger.

"He was a pioneer in the '70s because for the first time he brought in Italy the technique of finger picking or finger style," he says.

In this session, you'll hear about the unique way this group of finger-style enthusiasts run the venue for their community, and you'll hear performances from some of the members, including Sergio's son Fabrizio.

"He loves the music I always played, and even more, now he teaches me," he says.

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.

Copyright 2025 XPN

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).
Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
Related Stories