The Sanremo Miracle
For all its folklore, the storied Italian festival contains a deeper truth about our relationship to music.
Every year since 1951, as the month of February passes by, millions of Italians huddle around their television to watch a music festival like no other, broadcasted live from a coastal city up north, in the Liguria region, a few miles from the French border.
The Sanremo festival is a yearly celebration of Italian music, and the country’s launching pad for the Eurovision contest. Over a 5-night marathon in Sanremo’s Ariston Theatre, two dozens of Italian artists premiere an original song, backed by an orchestra. Aired on the Rai Uno channel, the festival has two main categories—big artists and newcomers—special prizes, one guest of honor (this year Zlatan Ibrahimović, of all people), strangely solemn interview segments, bouquets for all performers, random comedy routines, plus an inscrutable voting system. Yet the show’s premises remain fairly simple: a whole lot of artists, brand new songs, one winner.
From an outsider perspective, Sanremo is a unifying event like no other, part Super Bowl, part papal address, all national treasure. The truth for Italians might be closer to a love/hate relationship. At the mention of the festival, the reaction of the few locals I surveyed varied from pure excitement—my Roman friends binge-watched the whole thing, glued to their WhatsApp group chat—to stunned embarrassment (a young Milanese doctor panned Sanremo without blinking: “It’s so cheesy, I would have to hide to watch it”, she told me. I kinda took it personally.) Yet, the Sanremo impact is hard to overstate: virtually all major Italian singers of the past decades, from Zucchero to Laura Pausini to Mahmood, can link a chapter of their career, if not all of it, to the festival. And the charts effect is staggering: the week after the 2021 edition, 17 of the Top 20 songs in Italy’s Billboard Hot 100 were Sanremo songs.
Sanremo is hard to categorize. It is indeed a festival, but it’s also a never-ending award ceremony, an All-Star Game of Italian pop, and a banquet of old-fashioned TV glitz. What makes Sanremo fairly unique is its egalitarian premise. The festival presents a world where all generations of Italian artists are equal, no matter their age or the range of their career (Orietta Berti, this edition’s elder candidate, did Sanremo for the first time in 1966 ; rapper-singer Madame, the youngest, was born in 2002). That gives the show the feel of a family reunion, with rebel teens, embarrassing uncles and dramatic moms all sitting at the same table.
This year, Laura Pausini, arguably Italy’s biggest pop star, came back to Sanremo right after her Golden Globe victory for best original song, a first for an Italian artist. She could have skipped the formality, and yet here she was, welcomed like a homecoming queen by host Amadeus and his sidekick Fiorello. On stage, she was brought to tears discussing her big win, 28 years after her breakthrough on the Sanremo stage. Then, for some reason, the singer and the hosts improvised a beatboxed version of Corona’s dance anthem “Rhythm of the Night” (another Italian export). It was a mess, but a beautiful one, and the moment captured everything that make Sanremo an endearing experience: the show is random, joyful, exhausting, at times dramatic, but also genuinely moving. Sanremo has all the tropes of vintage TV shows, yet there is, at the core of it, a sense of shared pride and an intergenerational bond that makes it a truly communal experience.
As a postcard of Italian music culture, Sanremo is irresistible, but it also achieves something more, something that requires to sit through the whole week and take it all in.
Awards shows like the Grammys or France’s Victoires de la Musique are rearview celebrations of what’s already successful. Movie festivals build hype in exclusive circles, but the movies are left unseen to the larger public. Sanremo is different: all songs are new, and repeatedly premiered in front of the largest national audience. This set-up makes the festival a real-time demonstration of the process that turns a novelty sound into a recognizable pattern, a pattern into a sing-along tune, a tune into an all-time favorite. Sanremo exists to make songs grow on you.
In 2021, Sanremo offered again many of these song moments that burst into the world and quietly make their way into your mind. These were the epic violins in La Rappresentante di Lista’s “Amare”, or Annalisa saying three perfectly-chosen words in “Dieci” (Baci Francesi Delivery!), or the hair-in-the-wind joy of Coma_Cose’s “Fiamme negli occhi”. But even though the final prize ended in the hands of Roman rock band Måneskin, Sanremo 2021 may soon be remembered as the year of “Musica leggerissima”.
On Tuesday, March 2, very few people in Italy had heard “Musica leggerissima”. The song, a duet by classy singers Colapesce and Dimartino, is a wonderful mise en abyme: it’s a seemingly casual pop song about the joy of casual pop songs. “Musica leggerissima” was performed in front of empty seats due to social-distancing restrictions, with 8.3 millions of people watching at home. On the first night, it was easy to look no further than the singers’ semi-ironic dandy looks and the somewhat familiar arrangements of guitars and whistles. The highlight was the spandex-wearing rollerskater who erupted midway to glide around the duo (a twist that the trash italiano content factory immediately turned into a meme).
The video for “Musica leggerissima” dropped one day later, adding layers of dark surrealism over the song’s initial impression. With its still-life shots of cemeteries, junkyards, hungover sunglasses and black-clad mothers, the video revealed “Musica leggerissima” as the elegy its carefree hook had kept under a veil. Over the course of a few days, the song had molted. First it had been a little breeze of a song, then a pretty catchy one, then a probable summer hit for an uncertain summer. One week later it was whole. “Musica leggerissima” is a lament on everything the world has lost over the last year. As I write, it is now the number one song in Italy.
Beyond the decorum, the true power of Sanremo is there. The show ritualizes the transformation of a song from a blank slate to an intricate composition of sounds, emotions and memories. And that makes the festival a truthful manifestation of the invisible threads that gradually connect us with music. When I was a kid, I always wondered, while listening to the radio, how it was possible for humankind to continue inventing great songs, with only so much words and notes available. Somewhere on the horizon, there was a song I couldn’t know, a song with unheard melodies and unsung hooks, but soon this song would exist, and I would love it. Despite everything I have learned since, this mystery has never really left me, and it took the beauty of Sanremo to bring me closer to that innate miracle.
Bonus: My Top 10 Sanremo songs of the 2021 edition
Colapesce, Dimartino - “Musica leggerissima”
La Rappresentante di Lista - “Amare”
Annalisa - “Dieci”
Madame - “VOCE”
Francesca Michielin, Fedez - “CHIAMAMI PER NOME”
Noemi - “Glicine”
Coma_Cose - “Fiamme negli occhi”
Gaia - “Cuore Amaro”
Arisa - “Potevi fare di più”
Irama - “La genesi del tuo colore”