Nerys's Guide to Italian Music - Giorgia

Giorgia Todrani was born in Rome on the 26th of April 1971. She's one of the most popular artists of recent years, selling over 6 million albums since her self-titled debut in 1994. She's released 23 singles, five of which have reached Number One.

Giorgia's career started in 1993 when she took part in the Giovani section of Sanremo, for young artists. She came first, and the following year participated with the song E poi which was co-written by her, but was only placed seventh. She returned again in 1995 with Come saprei which was placed first, and also awarded the Premio della Critica (the Critics' Prize), the first time the two prizes had been awarded to the same song.



By 1997, after another appearance at Sanremo in 1996, Giorgia was on her third album, Mangio troppo cioccolato, which gave her her first Number One album in Italy. It was also released in several countries worldwide. The highest charting single from the album was also the first one to be released from it, Un'ora sola ti vorrei, which reached No.3 that year.



The first song of Giorgia's I ever heard was one from 1999, the title track from her Girasole album. It was during a language course in Urbino, and the song was one that was used for a fill-in-the-gap listening exercise. It's become one of my favourite songs of hers. The album remained in the charts for over a year.



Giorgia's second Number One single came in 2003 with Gocce di memoria, which was also the biggest selling single of the year. It's an autobiographical song which deals with the importance of memories, and it also refers to the death of her partner  Alex Baroni, who died in a car accident in 2002.



Giorgia has also duetted with other Italian singers, including Gianna Nannini on Salvami in 2009.



My favourite song of hers is from the summer of 2012, Tu mi porti su. It was written by Jovanotti and also features him on the track. It reached Number 6 on the singles chart in Italy.

Sunday Classic

Today in 1963 Adriano Celentano was at Number One with Il tangaccio.

Eurovision 2013

Italians don't quite get my love for Eurovision. For them it's all about Sanremo, which is a completely different beast. They grew up on Sanremo, and I grew up on Eurovision. But on Italy's third year back in the competition it seems that the country is starting to understand the concept of the Song Contest.

After hovering around 10th place for much of the voting, Italy finished in a respectable 7th last night, two positions higher than Nina Zilli last year. Not too bad for a country outside the Eastern European voting blocks, and with few neighbours. And one of Italy's neighbours, Malta, didn't even give them 12 points!

For a Eurovision veteran the Rai commentators disappointed me. Not only for their constant talking which meant that we missed the song that had been specially composed to open the evening, amongst other things. The two radio presenters from Rai Radio 2 from last year were back again this year, but this time round they were joined by a female voice, a Swiss girl from the Italian-speaking part of the country. Not only was her general Eurovision knowledge better than theirs, but her English was too. What made me lose faith in the commentators was doing the interval between the acts and the votes being annouced, when there was a crash course in the history of Eurovision. They called Bucks Fizz ABBA. Nil points for that!

Marco put on a great performance. Unlike all of the other acts, it was just him on stage. No backing singers, no band, no pyrotechnics or any other shenanigans. As he said in an interview before the competition, it would be him and his voice, nothing else, just the essenziale, the essential.

Word of The Week

Gli occhiali - glasses

These are the two pairs of occhiali that you can see me wearing at the moment. It was when I was 22, about a month before my move to Italy that I got prescribed glasses, after a lifetime of having perfect vision. The funky sunglasses I bought a couple of weeks ago, in preparation for the summer. To get the Italian for sunglasses add da sole after occhiali, they're glasses for the sun. There's also the word for eyes, occhi, in the word occhiali. Occhiali is a masculine plural noun beginning with a vowel, which means that the definite article in front of the noun is gli and not i.

My least favourite Italian words

Some time ago I wrote about my favourite Italian words. So for fairness, here are the words that I don't like quite as much.

Piacere - to like

Don't even get me started on this, this verb is a nightmare. Ok, liking something as in the sense of how I like gelato's fairly straightforward, 'mi piace'. Even though I'm the one doing the liking the verb's congiugated as if the liking were done by someone else, it's the 'mi' that shows that I like it. The verb conjugation always refers to the object that's being liked, in this case the gelato is the it/he/she single 3rd person singular. Confused? That's why it's such a nightmare.

Mancare - to miss

The conjugation works in the same way as piacere, yet for some reason my brain seems to get the concept of mancare better. So basically if I were speaking to someone on the phone who I was missing I would say 'mi manchi', I miss you. The 'i' at the end in the present tense is used in the second person (familiar) conjugation of verbs.

Altrettanto - likewise/as much/the same

Too. Many. Ts. I mean, four out of 11 letters?? I trip over my tongue every single time I say it. Avoid avoid avoid.

Arrivederci - Goodbye

And this has too many rs. I swear this is a test the Italians thought up to see if us foreigners were capable of speaking their language. It makes me sound awfully foreign and feel very paranoid every time I try to say it.