Most people know that Italy was the cradle of cinema in the 1960's, but few people know it was also the cradle of music... on an international level.
During the 60s, Italy was considered an interesting market for sales, in fact it was rather lucrative... and to top it all off, it was a beautiful place to visit and do sales promotion! Many American artists came to Italy to record their hits for the Italian market and actually sang in Italian!
Stevie Wonder himself spent some time in Rome (he was romantically involved with the legendary Roman singer, Gabriella Ferri) and he sang some tunes IN Italian!
Stevie doing his thing in Italian:
Stevie & Gabriella at San Remo music festival:
Not to mention my personal favorite, The Supremes singing an Italian version of "You Can't Hurry Love":
If you click on this link you'll see the number 1 hits from 1960-1969. The original title/version of the song is listed in parentheses, you can see how many of them were remakes in Italian and in English!
Needless to say I'm a HUGE fan of 60s music, so I was thrilled to discover this cross-continental collaboration with some of my favorite golden oldies.
Petula Clark sang her tune "Downtown" in Italian. There's a funny story about this song- those of you who watch LOST might recall that the original song "Downtown" was featured in a few scenes with Juliet. The Italian dubbed version of LOST used the Italian version of the song (called "Ciao Ciao") as opposed to the English version of it. I found it rather amusing:
