Sabati, Domeniche e Lunedì playlist

Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays

A decidedly important place in the panorama of record production in Italy is held by songs dedicated to the days of the week, and especially to weekends. These are often the pieces by well-known musicians, such as Mario Mariotti, Eugenio Mignone, Vittorio Mascheroni, Eldo Di Lazzaro and Gorni Kramer, who entrusted their compositions to equally famous lyricists, including Nino Rastelli, Nisa, Pietro Garinei and Sandro Giovannini. The result is a group of simple songs dedicated to days of rest, which though diverse were almost always marked by success. Sometimes international hits were adapted with lyrics in Italian, which were nonetheless recorded by the best-known artists of the era. This is the case of ‘Triste domenica’, a song that brings a series of anecdotes in its wake that emerge from the – often warped – superstitious imagination, as frequently happens in the world of entertainment. An exception to this trend, one worthy of note, is Rodolfo De Angelis, a true ‘genius’ of the 1930s for his originality and artistic independence. Here he is represented by the song ‘Menica (non vedo l’ora che arrivi domenica)’, which shows how a theme as trivial and overused as this one can actually go against the grain and surprise listeners. So this collection begins at the Roman festival of San Giovanni of 1936 with ‘Quanno è domenica’ and ends with what has just about become the anthem of Sundays, ‘Domenica è sempre domenica’, the main theme of Un paio d’ali, the musical by Garinei and Giovannini: here we present a lesser known version by the diva Giovanna Ralli.

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