Through the music of Antonio Vivaldi, Ezra Pound could become a cultural administrator for Mussolini's Fascist regime, reviving modern Italian culture through its rich cultural heritage. Since the early 1930s, Pound had been working with German composer Gerhart Munch and American violinist Olga Rudge (Pound's lover and the mother of his daughter) to offer innovative concerts in Rapallo. They called these concerts “Tigullian Studies,” after the Gulf of Tigullio on whose coast Rapallo lies, and the programs featured Munch and Rudge and whatever traveling musicians—often very well known—were in town. Pound helped to choose the music, produced publicity, and introduced the pieces and their history. As we shall see, he also produced much of the Vivaldi material the Tigullians performed. Originally, the Tigullians were interested in Vivaldi as a source of new material, but as they began to discover his unknown music, they invested in Vivaldi for his own sake.

As hard as it is to imagine the world of classical music without Antonio Vivaldi, his work was largely unknown until the 1930s. Now we know of over 770 works by him, but when Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound began looking for music to perform in Rapallo, only about 100 pieces were known. Thanks in part to the work of Stephen J. Adams, Anne Conover Carson, Giulio de Angelis, Archie Henderson, and R. Murray Schafer, we know a great deal about Rudge's and Pound's efforts toward reviving Vivaldi's work. Pound's actual work with the music for these concerts and the significance of his investment in them to his larger attempts to become a part of the cultural Nationalist projects of Fascist Italy have not previously been addressed. We have seen how desperately Pound wanted to contribute to the Fascist project, and Italy's musical heritage offered the opportunity.