Nicolò Francesco Faraglia is a guitarist, composer and improviser from Rieti, in Italy's Lazio region, born in 1992. He picked up the guitar at eleven, studied classical guitar, then enrolled in the jazz program at the Fondazione Siena Jazz, where his teachers included Roberto Cecchetto, Stefano Battaglia, Mirco Mariottini and Silvia Bolognesi. From 2017 to 2019 he took part in Battaglia's permanent laboratory of musical research at Siena, working in trio and quartet formats, and according to his own biographical listings was selected in August 2019 to join a new Battaglia ensemble, Tabula Rasa. That connection comes from label and press biographies rather than a recording credit: none of the three albums the Tabula Rasa Ensemble released on Centripeta in 2025 (KUM!, Qawn, Goum) lists Faraglia among the personnel.

His debut as a leader was Smòs Octet (Aut Records, 2019), a suite for eight players conceived to connect improvisation, jazz and chamber music. It was recorded November 2 and 3, 2018 in a session hosted by the Fondazione Siena Jazz and released December 16, 2019, with Faraglia composing, arranging and producing in addition to playing guitar. The band brought together trumpeter Jacopo Fagioli, saxophonists Cosimo Fiaschi and Francesco Panconesi, baritone saxophonist and bass clarinetist Federico D'Angelo, pianist Luca Sguera, double bassist Amedeo Verniani and drummer Pier Foschi, recorded by Dan Kinzelman.

At Siena he also met drummer, singer and composer Evita Polidoro and guitarist Davide Strangio; the three formed the trio Nerovivo in 2018, which reached the final of the 2019 Conad Jazz Contest. Nerovivo made two albums with Faraglia and Strangio sharing the guitar chair around Polidoro's drums, voice and electronics: Nerovivo (Tǔk Music, February 16, 2024), executive-produced by trumpeter Paolo Fresu on his own label, and Mi Giurano Eternità (Columbia/Sony Music Italy, June 12, 2026), a shorter, more electronics-forward record on which Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo guests on the track "i see big changes."

Faraglia's other leader album is Kissòs (Aut Records, 2022), a trio with double bassist Gabriele Evangelista and drummer Nicholas Remondino. Recorded November 21 and 22, 2021 at Cicaleto Recording Studio in Arezzo by Francesco Ponticelli, its nine tracks - "Dithýrambos," "Paurosía," "Phásma," "Échidnai," "Epipháneia," "Ikárion," "Oînops," "Trieterís" and "Thýein" - take their titles and thematic material from the myth and ritual of Dionysus; kissós is ancient Greek for ivy, one of the god's iconographic symbols.

Further credits fill out a catalog centered on Siena Jazz's improvising circle. He plays guitar on Ruah (Fonterossa Records, 2022) by flutist and composer Carlotta Vettori's group CV53, alongside his former teacher Silvia Bolognesi on contrabass and drummer Andrea Melani. Variazioni (Superpang, released December 6, 2024) is a co-led duo record with saxophonist Cosimo Fiaschi, twenty brief, serialism-inflected improvisations recorded February 28, 2024 at GADA in Florence. An earlier, stylistically distant credit is Fall From Grace (Timezone, 2016), a folk-rock album by the Roman singer-songwriter project Mattia Caroli & I Fiori Del Male, on which Faraglia plays electric guitar and arranges the violin parts. Most recently he plays acoustic guitar on Hìeratico (OOH-sounds, 2026), an electronic and experimental record led by percussionist Nicolas Remondino that sits outside the jazz world entirely.

His most recent work as a leader is Languages (Fonterossa Records - the label founded by his former teacher Silvia Bolognesi - released April 22, 2026), a solo electric guitar album recorded in 2025 and built from more than a decade of accumulated influences: original compositions alongside a reading of the Ottoman classical piece "Hicaz Saz Semai," moving between contemporary composition, folk material and improvisation. He presented it live on April 25, 2026 at the Chiesa di San Rufo in Rieti, closing the set with a solo-guitar arrangement of an Italian Liberation Day song for the occasion, and had previewed the same solo project at a November 30, 2025 concert in Foligno. Languages has not yet been catalogued on Discogs. Italian press coverage around that date places him based partly in Stockholm, where he studies at the Royal College of Music (KMH).

Faraglia's catalog runs from group composition to free improvisation without settling into either. Smòs Octet is the most structured of his records, an eight-piece suite that treats improvisation, jazz writing and chamber music as compatible materials rather than opposed styles - reviewers and the label describe the album's four movements as built around harmony, melody, rhythm and timbre in turn. Kissòs narrows the ensemble to a guitar trio and narrows the material to variations on a single mythological subject, closer to the free-improvisation and contemporary-jazz language of Siena's improvising scene. Nerovivo, by contrast, is explicitly a rock-adjacent project: two electric guitars and drums working a seam between contemporary jazz, post-rock and songwriting, with Faraglia's guitar functioning as texture and atmosphere alongside Strangio's rather than as a soloist's voice. Variazioni, his duo record with Cosimo Fiaschi, pushes furthest into abstraction, twenty short pieces the label frames as an exercise in bringing serial technique into real-time improvisation. Languages widens the frame again, folding in Ottoman classical repertoire and folk material alongside his own compositions for solo electric guitar - a synthesis the Rieti concert framed explicitly around Italian historical memory as well as musical language.