A Taste of Italian Music

August 17th, 2011 in Featured by The Kitchen Sisters2 Comments

Buongiorno! The Kitchen Sisters’ menu of the day offers you a little new sister from Italy, Virginia, who will try to delight you the best she can with
a tidbit of our female historical voices that crushed hearts and made bodies tremble!

In the 60s Italy reached a peak in music history. It shook with new, vibrant, wild and eclectic voices. The Sanremo Festival (the biggest music event of the time) was giving voice to the best songwriters.
Italians are known to be passionate and they have always been good at interpreting the soul of a woman. But who has been the best?

Mina, the muse, the queen of all of them, whose songs describe women’s agony, hopes and fears, couldn’t do it better. Who hasn’t ever felt like this.

“If I, calling you,
were able to tell you goodbye
I would do it….
If I, seeing you again,
were able to tell you stop!
I would see you…”

Mesmerized by this deep and intense voice Italians, have been enchanted forever.

But please listen also to this! Mina wouldn’t fall at everyone’s feet:

In the song, he says, “Darling, what happens tonight, I look at you and to me, it is like the first the time…You are my love’s sentence that started but never ended…You are like the wind who brings roses and violins…My yesterday, my tomorrow, my always.” She replies, “Words, words, only words…roses and violins, tonight give it to someone else!” (brava!)

A fire-red hair girl, Ornella Vanoni broke the wall of success by that time, and tears followed by gloomy smiles would come along very easily listening to her soft voice.
She says, “What’s happened, what’s happened? It happened that I fell in love with you…”

But I think her best song is “Rossetto e Cioccolato” (Lipstick and Chocolate):
“It takes passion, a lot of patience, raspberry syrup and a drizzle of unconsciousness…Cook over low heat, mixing with feeling black stocking and white milk…It’s almost done. Throat satisfied, that’s how you do and you chew it slowly…for the heart and the palate.”

Could you find a better recipe for this hungry city I’m now in, San Francisco? Maybe, for once, instead of choosing cucumbers from San Francisco’s Ferry Building…

But these ladies haven’t been dreaming and waiting all day long. They got angry, very angry. Ask Loredana Berte and she’ll tell you that she is “someone for whom the war is never ended!” and would have ordered her man to tell her every night “Sei Bellissima!” (You are beautiful). Here you have her strong and hoarse scream:

Times change and a new wave streamed in. Overseas people were already starting to shake their hips and Italy wanted exactly the same! So while in the US, Elvis Presley was already called a king, we had our lovely Caterina Caselli starting to bewitch the crowd.

Ok, ok so her song is a cover from The Monkees, but what a performance! And Italians still needed a little push and to find their own Janis Joplin.

But of course someone with a clearer idea was already thinking about a very particular dance. Someone like the “forever-blond” Raffaella Carra’:
“It’s called Tuca Tuca
I invented it (the dance)
to tell you
I like I like I like you
AH AH!”