il favoloso quattro / Exclusive Italian 26-disc Beatles box set
Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has recently started a big Beatles promotion where they are supplying their readers over – the next weeks and months – with the entire Beatles canon and a unique box set which will hold a total of 22 individual titles (and 26 discs!). We have an exclusive photo gallery of this new set for you to view….
Each individual Beatles album will be made available from Corriere della Sera newstands each week (at a price of €9.90 – or €12.90 for doubles) or alternatively they can be ordered online but they will only ship to Italy (dang!)
The process started a few weeks ago and the first album, Abbey Road, came with the ‘free’ box set. The next two have been Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Let It Be.
What’s really interesting is that this box will not only hold the familiar complete studio output from 1962-1970 (including Past Masters) but it will also include both remastered Live at the BBC volumes, the Love album, and the Anthology DVDs! This will be the first time the DVDs of the somewhat forgotten TV extravaganza will available separately, having been issued as a complete box set back in 2003. They will also of course be issued in CD-style digipacks. Curiously, the Anthology CDs are absent, perhaps because they are currently almost 20 year old masterings.
In Italy these newspaper tie-ins are quite frequent and as reported by this blog a similar (but smaller) set of The Beatles’ CDs were issued by La Repubblica a few years back.
Special thanks to our friend Iuri Martelli for supplying these great photographs.
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Not allowed to sell at discogs…..unofficial??
Hi Paul. “The Fab Four” in italian is “I Favolosi Quattro”. Just fyi.
Am I the only one who noticed Anthology 1,2,3,4,&5 on the side of the box?!
Nice set, but there seems to be no sense to the order the discs are listed in. And those digipacks are horrible. Mini-LP’s or jewel cases only for me.
Honestly – at this stage of the game – the only way I’ll buy these yet again is if they’re SACD or BluRay.
Why are the albums not being released in the correct order? Very odd. Lovely set though; fingers crossed that Universal might do something similar in the UK next year?
similar treatment for the Iron Maiden:
http://mondadoriperte.it/2014/05/iron-maiden-the-beast-collection/
Hmmm I’ll be in Italy in 20 days, hope I will bump into this box (the empty box and 1st CD would be enough so I would just have to buy the individual stereo digipacks to fill in (I have the Mono, US and Japan Boxes but never bothered buying the Stereo one plus I have the original vinyl “Blue box”…). I will just miss the Anthology DVDs in digipack format (got the old box though) but I would replace them with the blue and red compilations maybe…
I’d like to bet there has been some kind of exclusivity deal done with ITunes that keeps the remastered Anthology CDs from coming out. Lets hope it soon runs out!!
“I Favolosi Quattro”, not “favoloso”, ’cause it’s plural. Correct, please :)
The title is wrong Paul. In italian it’s “I Favolosi Quattro” because “Il Favoloso Quattro” is a singular form. Anyway I never heard anyone calling them that way in Italy.
If definately get this if it was available in the UK, having not updated my CDs to include the remastered versions.
…ahem… “il favoloso quattro” in italian sounds really funny, because it means something like “the fabulous number 4”! :)
A more correct translation for “Fab Four” may be “i favolosi quattro”, but actually nobody refers to the Beatles in that way here in Italy…
La Repubblica/L’Espresso is doing the same with MJ’s discography
Has there been any talk of the Anthologies getting the remaster treatment, or of the videos being released on Blu-ray?
Would like to see the Anthology on Blu-ray as well. Wonder if they’ll eventually have some type of super deluxe box set with the CDs and DVDs and/or Blu-rays. That would be hefty.
I definitely agree. Especially since the three EPs (Baby, It’s You (from Live at the BBC) Free As A Bird (Anthology 1) and Real Love (Anthology 2)) are out of print, and not available on iTunes. Even better would be an “EP album”, with the nine tracks from the three above EPs, the four iTunes-only tracks from Love, and the Beatle Movie Medley (since Capitol released it, it was an official release, even if it’s not canon).
To eBay!
I initially read this as “SiDE photo exclusive”. The first picture does show the side of the box after all.
Two years ago, Here in Argentina , …something smiliar happened with the John Lennon albums…. The newspaper La Nacion & EMI Music of Argentina made a special edition of every album from John Lennon Plastic Ono Band ( that included a Beatles Poster…Not Lennon poster ..?? ) to Milk and Honey …The cds came in a mini hardbook edition with a booklet with information in spanish in a great quality paper … ( These cds looks like ….The Rising Hardbook Edition by Springsteen …maybe some people remember the edition)
Too bad its for those crappy Digpacks
Very nice. Wish they’d done a box like that for the ’09 stereo CDs (I really dislike that outsize box they came in. Same problem with the Pink Floyd box. Seriously considering throwing them both away and just having the CDs out on the shelves).