21 June 2018 • Snap Italy

City song: the 5 most beautiful songs dedicated to Italian cities

«There is something nicer than to dedicate your yearning to those who seduce you and then abandon you: to dedicate your art, music, to the beauty of Italian cities. Read on to discover the 5 most beautiful city song dedicated to Italian cities»

The Belpaese, you know, enchants you. History, art, exquisite food and a Mediterranean climate to be enjoyed. How could our musicians not be fascinated by the wonders of Italian cities and landscapes? Snap Italy takes you on an all-musical journey along the 5 Italian cities that most inspired our artists. An unmissable tour that will touch Rome, Bologna, Venice, Naples and Genoa. These are some of the most beautiful city song.

Rome

Many, many songs have told the magic of the capital, with its illuminated domes and breathtaking monuments at every corner. But it is to Antonello Venditti that we decided to assign the podium. In Roma Capoccia, a song of ’92, the Roman singer-songwriter shouts pure love verses in the presence of his majestic queen, turning it into a great city song:

How beautiful are Rome
when it is sunset, when the orange still blushes on the seven hills
and the windows are like so many eyes
that seem to say: how beautiful you are!

Bologna

Lucio Dalla is also very much in love with his Bologna to whom he has dedicated many verses. The most beautiful, perhaps, are those of Dark Bologna: walking along the streets of one of the most beautiful Italian cities with the singer is truly incredible.

I turn on the engine, I look in the mirror
and, with a little pain, I see bologna reflected with her red
walls behind me, that gradually disappears.

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Venice

Venice is the most loved and fascinating of Italian cities, and Guccini sings about its double nature in Venezia, a suspended port between the land and the sea, a happy island of tourists, empty and silent like a movie set in the evening because “Venice it’s a hotel, and the gondola is just a ride of the carousel”. But “Venice is also a dream, of those you can buy”.

Naples

Delicate and touching is Pino Daniele with his city song Napul’è, which we could not help but choose as a song that best recounted the many aspects of this city of a thousand faces, tender and brutal, from the “voice of creatures that come out little by little” to the thousand fears that accompany a city that the whole world knows: all have been there, yet still “nobody knows the truth”.

Genoa

We close our list of city songs to discover the songs dedicated to Italian cities with an author who has been the backbone of the history of Italian music, Fabrizio De André. The Genoese singer-songwriter has written a lot about his city, often using the same Genoese dialect in successes such as Creuza de ma. But it is the La Città Vecchia that particularly strikes a chord, because in it De André speaks of Genoa without ever mentioning it, telling it through the faces that populate it. A storyteller like him is able to put together more lives, from the baby prostitute to the pensioners “swollen with wine”, to the professor transformed into a student by “public wife”, in a collective absolution of all sins because “if they are not lilies they are still children, victims of this world”.