Non solo canzonette

Leonardo Campus is well qualified to write this lively, if brief and at times wandering, account of the first decade or so of the Sanremo Music Festival, post-Second World War Italy’s most durable and resonant popular music show. Campus holds a research position in history at Rome University, bolstered by high qualifications as a pianist, while also doing journalistic work for RAI, Italy’s national broadcaster. As a friendly preface to the book states, Campus is therefore driven by ‘not only the rigour of a historian but also the passion of a musician’ (p. x). In the sometimes austere, not to say narrowly Rankean, arenas of Italian academic history writing, Campus is still a little self-conscious about the combination; he commences his book with a studiously self-justifying introduction, keen to proclaim that songs are meaningful both as ‘sources’ and ‘agents’ of history (the emphasis is his, p. 6). He virtuously summons the ghosts of the historians of the interdisciplinary Annales school against those unnamed opponents who, he assumes, will be derisive about his research project to examine ‘the very special fusion of music and text’ in what was sung at Sanremo between 1951 and 1964 (p. 10)

Art · Art history · Humanities · Media studies · Passion · Political science · Rigour · Sociology · Summons · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci · Psychology