Former artistic director Kees Vlaardingerbroek, a specialist in Italian music, compiled a history of Italian travel accounts and poetry across the centuries. This served as the basis for the sensitive choral textures of Willem Jeths’ Viaggio italiano (Italian Journey), commissioned by the NTR ZaterdagMatinee.

In the central section, an Italian epitaph is heard for an eighteenth-century Dutch traveller who had hoped that Italy would improve his health; he died there at the age of 24.