Caruso

Lucio Dalla wrote it after a night in a hotel room in Sorrento. By his own account to the Corriere della Sera, he had stopped at the Excelsior Vittoria and found himself in the very room where the tenor Enrico Caruso had stayed shortly before he died. The owners told him about the singer's last days, and in particular about his passion for one of his young female students. Dalla went home with a song. The lyrics follow a man near the end of his life, looking into the eyes of a girl who means everything to him. They are full of quiet references to Caruso's world: Sorrento appears under its Neapolitan name, Surriento, and the refrain, written in a mix of Italian and Neapolitan, leans on an older Neapolitan song from 1930, "Dicitencello vuje", in the operatic romance tradition. Dalla filmed the official video in the hotel's Caruso Suite, even though Caruso actually died at another hotel in Naples. The song travelled far beyond pop. Luciano Pavarotti recorded it in 1989, and Florent Pagny's French single reached number two in France in 1996, with versions following by Lara Fabian, Chris Botti, Ana Belén in a duet with Dalla, and a Greek-language cover. When Dalla died in 2012, Italians went back to it in such numbers that it climbed to number two on the singles chart, a quarter century after he wrote it. A pop singer's tribute to an opera singer became the song people use to say goodbye to Dalla himself.