The album Amore Infinite
Originally, Placido Domingo and his son Placido Domingo Jr. had composed songs based on the Polish Pope’s religious poetry filled with the trappings of Catholicism. The opera singer then realised this might not spread the richness of the poetry as far as it could go and decided to make the songs more universal.
“I said, ‘This is fine, this is beautiful. … Maybe one day we should record this,’” he said in an interview. “But … this pope has been very much loved and admired by everybody, so there should exist other songs. So we found all this new material, so we found a lot of different themes.”
Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II in 1978, went on to be celebrated as the second longest serving pontificate in the history of the Vatican. In 1981 he barely survived an assassination attempt when the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Ağca opened fire on him during a parade in St. Peter’s Square.
Placido Domingo is a great admirer of the late Pope’s work which included a variety of published poems, plays and philosophical essays. Shortly before Wojtyla’s death in 2005, the tenor met with him and was thanked by the pontiff for previous operatic performances.
“When he was thanking me, I said, ‘Holiness, I know that you have wrote a lot more poems, so I would like it very much that we would put music to some of them, and record them,’” the Spanish great said. “He told me, ‘Oh, that would be wonderful,’ so in a way, he approve it.”
Domingo and his son believe the album Amore Infinite
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Poetry has been arriving via the metro in the highly polluted Manila megalopolis of the Philippine capital. Passengers on the Manila railway have been reading the verses of Pablo Neruda, Luis Cernuda, Lope de Vega and San Juan de la Cruz whilst travelling, thanks to a campaign to promote reading.
Scientists at the University of California have discovered that the act of writing poetry has a soothing psychological effect. The very action of composing verse is said to help the brain regulate emotion as well as decrease the feelings of fear, nervousness and sadness. This is due to the it inhibition of parts of the brain linked to emotional turmoil, and increases activity in the region to do with self-control. 
A recent Japanese study suggests that poetry in public toilets can cut down the amount of paper wastage by 20%. The Japan Toilet Labo, which released it’s findings earlier in the year, say that a stanza or two of interesting conservation-themed verse could go a long way to saving the environment. 
