The story, images and memories behind the video for the
song from Nothing But Truth (2011): from the elegant
rooms of the Regina Palace Hotel to the now inaccessible
interiors of one of Stresa’s most fascinating historic residences.
Some music videos are created simply to accompany a song. Others, as time goes by, end up preserving something that reaches beyond the music. The video for I Wanna Kiss Your Heart, from the Kerygmatic Project album Nothing But Truth, now belongs to the latter category. Made in 2011, the video was filmed entirely in Stresa and divided between two very different places connected by the same atmosphere: the Regina Palace Hotel, chosen for the opening sequence, and Villa La Palazzola, where the main part was set. Today, some fifteen years later, watching those images again means returning not only to a particular moment in the band’s history, but also to a villa that has since become unsafe and whose interiors can no longer be visited.
Two places in the history of Stresa
The two locations also represent two decisive chapters in the town’s history. Villa La Palazzola belongs to the nineteenth-century Stresa of grand residences overlooking the Borromean Gulf. It was commissioned by Count Flaviano Avogadro Casanova, and the foundation stone of the building, together with its oratory, was laid in June 1844. After several changes of ownership, the final heir, Adolfo Pini, donated it to the Municipality with the intention that a Foundation should use it to promote art and culture. The villa is therefore important not only for its architectural and landscape value, but also for the cultural heritage it was intended to return to the community. The Regina Palace Hotel, meanwhile, represents Stresa’s transformation into one of Lake Maggiore’s leading international holiday destinations. Opened in 1908, it retains the character of the Belle Époque and bears witness to the period when monumental hotels, the railway and elite tourism helped shape the town’s modern identity. Choosing these two places therefore meant travelling through almost a century of Stresa’s history within a single music video: from the aristocratic villas of the nineteenth century to the great hotel era of the early twentieth.
Two places, one story
The video opens at the Regina Palace Hotel. Here Elisa appears as a silent, almost suspended figure, filmed in black and white as she moves through the hotel. These images were never intended as a merely decorative prologue. They introduced an absence, the suggestion of a presence that could not be reached, while preparing the transition towards the place where the music would take physical form. The story then moves from the Regina to Villa La Palazzola, a nineteenth-century residence overlooking Lake Maggiore. The change of setting does not interrupt the story: it extends it, as though the rooms of the villa belonged to the same mental space suggested by the opening shots. The contrast between the inhabited elegance of the hotel and the motionless fascination of La Palazzola gave the video its melancholy character, suspended between reality, memory and imagination. Gaining access to the villa was by no means assured. La Palazzola was not open to the public even in 2011: permission had to be obtained from the Foundation that managed it and from the Municipality of Stresa. That day therefore gave the band a rare opportunity to enter rooms that were normally inaccessible, carrying instruments and a camera, and to turn them into a film set for a few hours.
Entering the villa
Villa La Palazzola did not need to be artificially transformed. Its rooms, corridors, windows and the traces left by time already possessed a visual power of their own. Rather than building a set, the task was to listen to the place and find a way to position the band within it without erasing its identity. The drums, bass and keyboards were carried into the villa and set up in the large room chosen for the trio’s performance. The instruments introduced a contemporary presence without taking away the building’s sense of stillness. This meeting of different worlds was precisely what made the images distinctive: an active band inside a house that seemed to hold on to its own past. At the time, of course, the main objective was to complete the music video. Nobody could have known that the footage would eventually acquire documentary value as well. Today the villa is unsafe, and the video preserves one of the few visual records of its interiors as they appeared then. With hindsight, perhaps we should have filmed much more: the rooms, their details, the corridors and everything that, at the time, was simply the setting for our shoot. Yet it is this very lack of awareness that makes the surviving images so authentic. We were not making a documentary; we were experiencing a space that we assumed would continue to exist unchanged.
Light as part of the narrative
Light was one of the video’s most important elements. The interiors of La Palazzola required us to work with what the building provided: daylight entering through the windows, areas of shadow and the differences between one room and another. These limitations were not concealed; they became part of the visual language of the video. The sequences featuring the band were deliberately given a cold colour palette. The intention was not to reproduce the rooms in a neutral or strictly realistic way, but to place them within a distinct emotional dimension. Elisa and the introduction at the Regina Palace, by contrast, are shown in black and white. The dialogue between these two treatments – the cold tones of the villa and the absence of colour in the prologue – creates a separation that remains perceptible through almost the entire video. This decision reaches its full meaning only in the final sequence.
The final dissolve
As the music fades, the three musicians slowly begin to dissolve as well. The room is left empty, with only the instruments remaining in place: presences without anyone to play them, traces of something that has just happened. During the same dissolve, the colour of the image also changes. The cold tone that accompanied the band gradually gives way to black and white, the same treatment that had until then characterised Elisa and the opening at the Regina Palace. It is a discreet transition, easy to miss on a first viewing, but it is also the key to the way the video ends. The distance between the two worlds disappears. The band vanishes and the room enters the same visual dimension as memory. Perhaps, in the end, we too have become part of the villa: passing figures absorbed by a place that was destined to remain – or so we believed at the time. In practical terms, it was a montage and colour-grading solution designed to give the music video a coherent conclusion. Over time, however, the image has acquired a meaning that we could not have foreseen in 2011. The empty room, the abandoned instruments and the transition to black and white now seem to anticipate the condition of La Palazzola itself: a place that can no longer be entered, surviving in images and in the memories of those who passed through it.
Fifteen years later
I Wanna Kiss Your Heart remains a record of one creative phase in the history of Kerygmatic Project, but it is also the memory of an unrepeatable day. The music of Nothing But Truth, the elegance of the Regina Palace Hotel, Elisa’s presence, the rooms of La Palazzola and the work required to turn all of this into a visual story coexist within the video. Watching it again today means noticing details that once belonged simply to the production process: a window, a wall, the changing light, the silence of a room after the last note. Above all, it means realising that a music video can become, without anyone planning it, a small time capsule. And perhaps this is the most precious legacy of that footage: for the duration of a song, Villa La Palazzola opens its doors once more, music fills its rooms again and everything that had disappeared returns, one more time, to life.
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