A feature by Stefano Nardelli

The rudiments of Lucia Ronchetti’s musical education took hold in the residence of her childhood neighbors, the Bevilacquas—a small, dark apartment full of loose gears and the wreckage of broken clocks. The second child of a large family of modest means, the composer was born in Rome on February 3, 1963, and was three years old when the Bevilacquas, a quite elderly couple, took her in. Mario Bevilacqua, an amateur violinist and composer, had made watchmaking his profession out of necessity. His wife Leny Hanh, a Swiss national, was also a musician, and it was at their encouragement that little Lucia experimented with the sounds produced by different instruments while absorbing the faith the couple held in the redeeming power of music.