ITALIAN SKETCHES
Illustration by Leo Cardini
Domenico Modugno
To watch an original clip of modugno singing nel blu, dipinto di blu, go to Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-dvi0ugelc.
At the beginning of January 1951, the first annual Festival della Canzone Italiana (Festival of the Italian Song) was held in Sanremo, a city along the western Ligurian coast, famous for its flowers. Known also as the Sanremo Festival, it lasted three nights. During the first two days, 10 songs were presented, a jury voted on them and the five songs with the most votes were then presented on the last night. The festival continues today, first televised live in Italy in 1955 and, in 1958, via Eurovisione, throughout Europe.
Although the Sanremo Festival still enjoys popularity, it is nothing compared to the delirium it caused in the 50s and 60s, when television was in its infancy and Italy, after the devastation of World War II, was gradually moving towards its economic boom years. Each year's festival was much like the rest, but for pop music around the world, the 1958 festival was exceptional.
That year, it was widely predicted that L'edera, one of the two songs to be sung by Nilla Pizzi, a homegrown, dark-haired Celine Dion of the day, would win. Then Domenico Modugno, also known as Mimmo, took the stage to sing Nel blu, dipinto di blu (‘In the Blue, Painted Blue'), or as it is best known, Volare (‘Flying'), the song he had written with Franco Migliacci. It won.
Over the years, the two men gave different accounts of how the song was born. Migliacci, the lyricist, first said he was inspired by the blue colour in paintings by Chagall that both he and Modugno admired, but later he recounted that the words came to him in a dream. Modugno claimed that the music came to him after seeing his wife Franca framed by the blue sky from a window in their house in Rome. In any case, the melody was so enchantingly catchy, so unlike anything before it, that its success was immediate-and enduring.
After the melodramatic ballad O Sole Mio, published in 1898, this was the first Italian song to become internationally famous, hitting no. 1 on the US charts for 13 weeks in 1958. Capitalising on its huge popularity, other singers, among them Dean Martin, Bobby Rydell and Al Martino, recorded English-language versions. The Gipsy Kings made a Spanish version. In time, Pavarotti and Boccelli also included it in their repertoires. In all, over 22 million copies of Volare were sold around the world. In America, where Modugno soon frequently performed, people simply called him ‘Mr. Volare'.
In 1959, Modugno again won the Sanremo Festival with another unforgettable melody, entitled Piove (‘It's Raining'), but often called Ciao ciao, bambina (‘Bye bye, Baby'). In all, Modugno won the festival a record four times and wrote the music and words of about 250 songs throughout his career, many of them hits written for other recording stars like Mina.
Born in Polignano a Mare in Puglia on January 9, 1928, this extraordinary composer learned to play the guitar and the piano accordion from his father and wrote his first song at age 15. Although he studied bookkeeping, he really wanted to be an actor. After a great deal of effort, Mougno managed to fulfil this dream and appeared in a total of 44 films, usually in supporting roles, especially in his early pictures. After his triumph with Volare, he also performed regularly on radio and television.
While rehearsing for a television quiz programme he hosted, La Luna del Pozzo, broadcast on Mediaset's Canale 5 in March 1984, Modugno suddenly felt ill. Not realising how serious it was, the studio doctor told him to take an aspirin and go home. That night, his condition worsened and he was rushed to hospital, having suffered a stroke which left him paralysed on one side of his body. More disastrous for a singer, his speech was impaired. In a wheel-chair and unable to work, Modugno sued Mediaset but accepted, in the end, an out-of-court settlement.
Supporting the rights of the handicapped and people in his condition and searching for high-profile candidates, the leftist Radical Party asked Modugno to stand in the 1987 elections. He was not new to politics: he had donated the royalties of the song L'anniversario to help finance the Socialist Party's campaign to stop the repeal of the Fortuna-Baslini law on divorce in a referendum in 1974.
He won, and once elected to Parliament, he dedicated himself wholeheartedly to fighting for the rights of the disabled and for performers' rights. He also became, for a period, joint president of the party, together with Marco Pannella. His greatest achievement was the closure, in 1988, of the mental hospital in Agrigento, where the patients lived in degradation. To celebrate this victory, he gave his first concert since his stroke for the benefit of the inmates.
Although in increasingly failing health, he continued to perform until 1993. He died on August 6, 1994 of a heart attack, ‘away from the maddening crowds' on the beautiful ‘blue' island of Lampedusa.
Deirdre Pirro is an international lawyer who lives and works in Florence. Apart from the law, her interests include modern Italian history, the history of gastronomy and travel. She can be contacted at ddpirro@gmail.com.
art: www.leocardini.it
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