Toto Cutugno is dead. Anyone who thinks they don’t know the singer is wrong. At least he knows his songs, which often made others hits. Adriano Celentano made it to second place with his “Soli” in 1979. When Cutugno still had rock star ambitions, he landed with his group in 1970 albatross and the song “Africa” had a small success, which Joe Dassin then made into a hit in French as “L’été indien”. In general, the French loved his fervent melodies. Mireille Mathieu sang his plays, Dalida, Johnny Hallyday and Michel Sardou. But back home in Italy he was soon a superstar. He has sold over 100 million records over the years. At the Schlager Festival in Sanremo he performed a total of fifteen times.
Salvatore Cutugno grew up in the Tuscan town of Fosdinovo. He learned drums and accordion. In the 1960s he tried his hand at various rock groups without success. After the time with albatross he let the import music stay. And in 1980 he won the competition in Sanremo with the song “Solo Noi”. Ten years later he won the Eurovision Song Contest (then Grand Prix Eurovision) with “Insieme: 1992” for Italy. Cutugno was soon a permanent presence on television, not only as a star, but also as a presenter.
He performed all over the world and became a kind of ambassador canzoni italiane. He also had no problem fulfilling all the expectations of the world audience: his best-known song “L’Italiano” from 1983 is almost bursting with devotion and is a loving enumeration of all the clichés about his country. So it starts right away: “Let me sing – with the guitar in my hand. Let me sing. I’m an Italian. Hello, Italy. The spaghetti is firm and a partisan as president.”
And then comes a melody that you can sing along after an estimated seven and a half seconds, plus there are violin sighs, ascending key changes and the kind of scratchy guitars that immediately transport you to a village square where you’re still cleaning away the wine bottles long after the sun has gone down. One does not know exactly whether the song was the blueprint for countless Italian hits, or the essence. It still works.
Things have gotten quieter around him in recent years. In 2010 he performed again in Sanremo. Now Toto Cutugno has died in Milan. He was 80 years old.