"To me, music that breaks your heart is the music that stays with you forever," muses the best-selling jazz artist Chris Botti when talking about his new album, Italia. "It's one thing to be melancholy and one thing to be sophisticated, but when you get the two of them together in a way people can relate to, then I think you're on to something You want the sophistication to lie in the purity of the sound, the beauty of the arrangements, and the quality of the performances."

With Italia, Botti has created a suite of songs and music inspired by the romance of Italy, each track conveying different aspects of that romance while the album flows with an overall conceptual integrity. Allowing his "love of slow moving orchestral pieces" to work through the album's arrangements, song choices, tone and melodic phrasing, Botti and his musicians have succeeded in conjuring an album of evocative atmospherics linking the worlds of jazz and pop and classical music.