La Canzone Napoletana: The Sound Naples Gifted to the World (13th Century–1950)

The canzone napoletana — the Neapolitan song — is the oldest and most influential musical genre of the Italian popular tradition. It was not born in a conservatory or an aristocratic court but in the streets, courtyards, and squares of the historic center of Naples, in the Neapolitan dialect, which is not exactly Italian but a language of its own with its own musicality, with more open vowels, softer consonants, and a natural tendency towards long melody and vocal ornamentation.

Its themes are those that have always occupied popular songs: love, the sea, the nostalgia for the land left behind, the beauty of the Gulf of Naples with Vesuvius in the background, the beloved woman who waits or does not wait. But what distinguishes the canzone napoletana from other Mediterranean popular traditions is not the themes — which are the same throughout the Mare Nostrum basin — but the way it expresses them: with a melody that rises towards emotion with the precision and ambition of opera, and with a structural simplicity that allows anyone to sing it.

This combination — the melodic ambition of opera with the accessibility of popular song — is the reason why the canzone napoletana conquered the world.

The Piedigrotta Festival: the competition that formalized the tradition

In 1830, the Festività della Madonna di Piedigrotta — the annual festival of the Madonna of Piedigrotta, in the Mergellina neighborhood of Naples — incorporated an annual songwriting competition that became the first popular music festival of the modern world.

The Festival di Piedigrotta was for more than a century the place where the most important Neapolitan songs premiered. Composers and lyricists from all over the city competed every September with new songs that aspired to become the anthem of the year. The winners became instant hits that played in every tavern and courtyard in Naples — and soon, thanks to emigration, in every Italian neighborhood of New York, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo.

From that competition came some of the most famous songs in the history of popular music in any language.

The songs that traveled the world

"Funiculì, Funiculà" (1880) — composed by Luigi Denza with lyrics by Peppino Turco to celebrate the inauguration of the Mount Vesuvius funicular — was presented at the Piedigrotta Festival that same year. The score was published by Casa Ricordi and sold more than one million copies in the first year. It was the first popular Italian song to reach that level of mass distribution. The piece became so popular that German composer Richard Strauss, upon hearing it during a trip to Italy, believed it to be an anonymous folk song centuries old and quoted it in one of his compositions — to his subsequent embarrassment when it emerged that it was a novelty from that very same year.

"'O Sole Mio" (1898) — lyrics by Giovanni Capurro, music by Eduardo di Capua — is probably the most recognized Italian song in the entire world. It does not speak of the sun but of the face of the beloved as a sun more radiant than the one in the sky: "Ma n'atu sole / cchiù bello, oje ne / 'o sole mio / sta nfronte a te" — "But another sun / more beautiful, oh ne / my sun / is on your brow." Elvis Presley recorded it in 1960 as "It's Now or Never." It has been covered in every possible language and in every imaginable genre. It remains the song the world hums when it wants to sound Italian.

"Torna a Surriento" (1894, with official copyright of 1905) — composed by Ernesto De Curtis with lyrics by his brother Giambattista — tells the story of someone who asks their beloved to return to Sorrento, that city on the cliffs of the Gulf of Naples where the air smells of orange blossom and the sea is a shade of blue that exists nowhere else. Legend has it that the mayor of Sorrento asked Giambattista to write the song to impress Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Zanardelli during an official visit. If true, it was the most successful cultural lobbying campaign in Italian history.

"Santa Lucia Luntana" — the Neapolitan variant of "Santa Lucia", which speaks of the neighborhood of the same name facing the harbor and of the emigrant's nostalgia — became the unofficial anthem of the millions of Italians who between 1880 and 1920 crossed the Atlantic to the Americas.

The great emigration: how Naples went to America

Between 1880 and 1920, approximately four million Italians emigrated to the United States. Most came from the south — from Campania, Calabria, Sicily — and most passed through the port of Naples before setting sail. They carried very little in their luggage: some clothes, perhaps a family photograph, and the songs.

Those songs — "Torna a Surriento", "'O Sole Mio", "Santa Lucia", "Core 'Ngrato" — became the thread that connected emigrants to the land they had left behind. They sang them in the tenements of Brooklyn and in the cafés of Buenos Aires and in the factories of São Paulo. They taught them to their children born in America so they would know where they came from. And through them, those songs reached ears that were not Italian and that found them equally beautiful.

The canzone napoletana was, in that sense, the first viral music in history: it spread across the world not through radios or records but through the bodies of millions of people moving from one continent to another carrying their repertoire in their throats.

Enrico Caruso: the voice that changed everything

But the person who did the most to bring the canzone napoletana to the world — and with it the idea of what Italian music could be — was a tenor born in Naples on February 25, 1873, into a poor family in the neighborhood of San Giovanni a Teduccio: Enrico Caruso.

He was the eighteenth of twenty-one children. He began singing in the neighborhood church for a few coins. He studied singing intermittently — his family had no money for a formal education — and made his debut in 1894 at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples, one of the least prestigious theaters in the city. In 1897, while rehearsing La Bohème by Puccini in Livorno, Puccini himself heard him and said, according to the anecdote that circulated for decades: "Who sent you to me? God?"

His first major international success came in 1898 at La Scala in Milan with Fedora by Umberto Giordano. From that moment on, his career was a succession of triumphs on the most important stages in the world: London, Saint Petersburg, Rome, Monte Carlo.

In 1902, Caruso did something no opera singer of his caliber had done before: he recorded his voice on a phonograph. Most of his colleagues rejected the technology due to the low fidelity of the early records. Caruso understood before anyone else what that technology meant: the possibility of his voice reaching people who could never afford a ticket to the Metropolitan Opera. He made approximately 290 recordings between 1902 and 1920 — the most complete documentation of an operatic voice in history up to that point.

In 1903 he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York — and he did not leave until his last performance, on December 24, 1920. For seventeen years, 863 appearances, 37 different productions: Caruso was the Metropolitan Opera for an entire generation of New Yorkers.

And at the Metropolitan, when the operas of Puccini and Verdi were over and the audience wanted more, Caruso would let his guard down from serious opera and sing the songs of his native Naples: "'O Sole Mio", "Torna a Surriento", "Core 'Ngrato". And the Metropolitan Opera — the most prestigious temple of opera in America — would fill with the songs of the tenements of Brooklyn and the ships arriving at the port of Ellis Island.

That was what Caruso did: build a bridge between opera and popular song, between Italy and America, between art and the lives of people who worked with their hands. He died on August 2, 1921, at the Hotel Vesuvio in Naples, at the age of forty-eight. He was the most famous singer in the world in any genre.

Roberto Murolo and Renato Carosone: the twentieth century renewing tradition

The canzone napoletana did not remain frozen in Caruso's versions. In the forties and fifties it found new performers who renewed it without betraying it.

Roberto Murolo — son of the poet Ernesto Murolo, one of the great lyricists of the Neapolitan tradition — was the most rigorous custodian of the classical repertoire: a lyrical and restrained voice who recorded with the austerity of someone who knows that a melody needs no additional ornaments because it is already perfect in itself.

Renato Carosone was the opposite pole: a Neapolitan pianist and composer who took the tradition of the canzone napoletana and mixed it with American jazz and postwar boogie-woogie to create a completely new sound that nevertheless felt completely Neapolitan. His "Maruzzella" (1954) and "Tu Vuò Fa' L'Americano" (1956) — a fierce irony about young Italians imitating American fashions — are documents of an Italy that was emerging from the war and looking at the world with a mixture of fascination and critical distance.

And Totò — the great Neapolitan comedian, the actor who was to Italian humor what Chaplin was to universal humor — wrote and recorded "Malafemmena" (1951), a canzone of love and heartbreak that over time became one of the classics of the genre. That it was written by a comedian says something about Naples: that the song belongs to everyone, not only to professional musicians, because in that city melody is a language that everyone speaks.

The legacy: what Naples taught the world's music

The canzone napoletana ended as a dominant genre with the arrival of rock and roll in the fifties and with the founding of the Sanremo Festival in 1951, which steered Italian music toward modern pop. But it did not die: it keeps playing in pizzerias all over the world, in the tenor trios that fill theatres on every continent, in the endless versions of "'O Sole Mio" that each generation feels compelled to record at least once.

Its legacy runs deeper than the individual songs. The canzone napoletana taught twentieth-century popular music that it was possible to combine the melodic ambition of opera with the accessibility of the street song. That the human voice — when trained with the discipline of bel canto and freed by the emotion of popular music — can reach places no other instrument can.

That is what Caruso, and Carosone, and Murolo, and all the singers who left through the port of Naples carrying those melodies in their throats, set out to prove: that the most local music in the world can be simultaneously the most universal.

Editorial note: "Funiculì, Funiculà" was composed in 1880 to celebrate the inauguration of the Mount Vesuvius funicular railway. The funicular was destroyed by the volcano's eruption in 1944. The song survived. There is something very Neapolitan about that: Vesuvius destroys the funicular, but the song that celebrated it is still playing one hundred and forty-five years later all around the world. Naples always understood that memory outlasts stone.