Milva - singer and actress

Popular star of five decades

Milva pictured at the start of her career in
1961, when she made her debut at Sanremo

The singer and actress known as Milva died on this day in 2021 in Milan at the age of 81.

Born Maria Ilva Biolcati in Goro, a fishing village on the Po delta, her popularity was such that she sold more than 80 million records. Her output was extraordinary, running to 126 singles and a staggering 173 albums in a career spanning more than half a century. No Italian artist has recorded so many albums.

For a time she bestrode the pop world, earning the nickname La Pantera di Goro  - The Panther of Goro - as recognition by the Italian media of her status as one of the three best-loved female performers of her generation, alongside Mina - dubbed the Tiger of Cremona - and Iva Zanicchi, who found herself labelled the Eagle of Ligonchio. 

Yet Milva was equally at home with musical theatre and opera and earned plaudits early in career when she sang Édith Piaf's repertoire at the prestigious Olympia theatre in Paris.  She was said to have an uncanny ability to sing almost any kind of music in any language after listening to it just once.

Her versatility enabled her to adapt to new trends in music and prolong her career. She had turned 70 by the time she announced her retirement from performing in 2010, although there was still time for one more album and a single, sung in German, in 2012.

The daughter of a dressmaker and a fisherman, as a child Milva had to work to support her family during tough times economically for Italy in the years after World War Two.

Milva in the 1980s, when she began a
collaboration with Greek composer, Vangelis

In her late teens she moved to Bologna, enrolled for singing and acting lessons and won a singing contest in which she was judged the best out of more than 7,500 entrants.

After recording her first single in 1960 with an Édith Piaf's song Milord, she made her live debut at the Sanremo Music Festival in 1961, finishing third. Over her career, Milva would enter Sanremo 15 times, a record for the number of appearances that she holds jointly with Peppino Di Capri, Toto Cutugno, Al Bano and Anna Oxa, although she never won, finishing second twice and third three times.

She demonstrated her versatility the following year with her performance of the Piaf repertoire in Paris, amazing both the audience and critics in the way she could sing in French with the emotion that Piaf brought to her work.

Nicknamed La Rossa because of her voluminous red hair, Milva’s ‘60s output included popular songs but also an eclectic mix of other material, including collections of Italian songs of the 1920s and ‘30s, revolutionary anthems and tango classics. She also appeared in a number of films and starred in Giorgio Strehler's stage production of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera.

In the ‘70s, when she was similarly prolific, she released albums in German and Japanese as well as Italian, and toured Italy, the USA, Greece, France, Germany, Canada, Russia and Japan. The ‘80s saw her begin a long-running collaboration with Vangelis, the Greek composer of electronic and progressive music, and devote much energy to fund-raising, either through albums or stage performances.

Milva during a performance in 2009,
captivating audiences at the age of 70

One of her most memorable hits was the song Alexander Platz, written by the Italian songwriter Franco Battiato in 1982, which explored love in divided Berlin during the Cold War years, its name inspired by the Berlin square, Alexanderplatz, a popular meeting place.

Perhaps uniquely, for her contribution to the culture of the three respective countries, she was awarded the highest honours from three governments: the Order of Merit of both the Italian and German republics, and the Knighthood of the French Légion d'Honneur.

She began to slow down only at the end of the 2000s, when she concluded that she was unable to reach the high standards she had always set for himself.

Married once, from 1961 to 1969, to the film and TV director Maurizio Corgnati, she was said also to have had romantic relationships with the actor Mario Piave, the lyricist Massimo Gallerani, and another actor Luigi Pistilli. 

She had a daughter, Martina, with whom she was living at the time of her death, which came after a period of illness attributed to a degenerative neurological disease.  After a private funeral, Milva’s body was laid to rest at the cemetery at Blevio, a small lakeside town on Lago di Como where she had a house.

Milva's home village of Goro sits on the edge of
the beautiful Po Delta regional park

Travel tip:

Goro, where Maria Ilva Biocati was born, is a fishing village on the edge of the protected Po Delta regional park, situated on the Emilia-Romagna side of the border with Veneto.  The Sacca di Goro, a large lagoon enclosed between the Po di Goro and the Po di Volano rivers, is an ideal habitat for mullet, sea bream, sea bass and for breeding of mussels, oysters and veracious clams, including the rare Golden Oyster of Goro, which is considered a delicacy, The Sagra della Vongola, Goro’s clam festival, takes place during the month of July each year, allowing visitors to enjoy the flavours and traditions of the area.

A story in La Repubblica newspaper about Casa 
Milva's role in the Insula Felix Foundation

Travel tip:

Milva’s home in Milan for 40 years was an apartment in an art nouveau palace in Via Serbelloni, an elegant area of the city between Porta Venezia and the Fashion Quarter. Recently, Milva’s daughter, art critic Martina Corgnati, has established the apartment, at No 9 Via Serbelloni, as the headquarters of the Insula Felix Foundation, which was set up by her late mother in 1984 as a non-profit institution as a place of research, the celebration of culture and for the support of young scholars, also promoting innovative forms of support for people with mental illness or neurological-psychiatric problems. 

Also on this day:

1554: The death of poet Gaspara Stampa

1857: The birth of opera composer Ruggero Leoncavallo

1939: The birth of Mafia boss Stefano Bontade

1964: The birth of leading conductor Gianandrea Noseda

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Lucio Battisti - singer-songwriter

Musician credited with writing ‘the soundtrack of Italian life’

Lucio Battisti, pictured performing at the
 Sanremo Music Festival in 1969

Lucio Battisti, who was one of the most influential figures in Italian pop and rock music in a career spanning four decades, was born on this day in 1943 in Poggio Bustone, a hillside village in the province of Rieti in Lazio, about 100km (62 miles) northeast of Rome.

A songwriter, singer and composer, his work has been described as defining popular music in Italy in the late 1960s and the 1970s in particular, although his popularity continued right up to his death, at the age of just 55, in 1998.

Some music critics and music historians have credited Battisti with writing ‘the soundtrack of our lives’ for several generations of young people, citing songs such as Emozioni (Emotions), Acqua azzurra, acqua chiara (Blue Water, Clear Water), Il mio canto libero (My Free Song) and La canzone del sole (The Song of the Sun) as his most memorable, although there were many more that made their mark.

Of Battisti’s 18 studio albums, 13 reached number one in the Italian charts, while he had at least 10 number one singles, of which his 1971 recording Pensieri e parole (Thoughts and Words) remained in top spot for 14 weeks.

At times during his career, he was spoken of as Italy’s Bob Dylan or Italy’s David Bowie, not for the style of his music as much as the fact that he enjoyed similar status as a cultural icon. Bowie spoke of his admiration for Battisti’s work, as did Bowie’s guitarist, Mick Ronson. The two made a cover version of Il mio canto libero, which Ronson went on to include on his debut solo album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, under the title Music is Lethal.

Giulio Rapetti, better known as Mogol,
wrote many of Battisti's lyrics

Among other international artists who covered or adapted Battisti’s compositions were the English group Amen Corner, whose 1968 hit (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice was based on Battisti’s Il paradiso della vita.

Much of Battisti’s success stemmed from his partnership with the Italian songwriter Giulio Rapetti, better known by his pen name, Mogol. They worked together for 15 years from the mid ‘60s to the early ‘80s, during which time Mogol’s captivating, emotional lyrics combined with Battisti’s innovative music to take the Italian pop scene by storm.

The son of a customs inspector, Battisti moved with his family to Rome at the age of four, settling in Pigneto, a working class neighbourhood to the southeast of the city centre, just beyond Termini station. Having taught himself the guitar, he began to play with bands in Rome and then Naples as a teenager. 

He enjoyed Naples, where he played with a group called I Mattatori, but did not earn enough to sustain himself and was forced to return to Rome. In the event, this proved fortuitous. Lead guitar with another local band, I Satiri, he found himself playing on the same bill as I Campioni, the support band to the then-famous Italian singer, Tony Dallara, who were in need of a guitarist and offered him the chance to move to Milan and work with them.

Once established in Milan, he was spotted by Christine Leroux, a French-born music producer who worked as a talent scout for the Italian label, Ricordi. It was she that introduced him to Mogol.

Battisti in Milan with his future
wife, Grazia Letizia Veronese

Their output provided hits for major Italian artists such as Mina, Ornella Vanoni and Patty Pravo, before ultimately Battisti’s own, unusually versatile vocals, which displayed at times soft, velvety tones, piercing falsetto moments and the gritty power of rock, became their trademark. Their songs were less dominated by political messages than many popular artists of their era, but young, urban Italians in particular seemed to identify with Mogol’s lyrics as a reflection of their own lives. 

Not long after recording his 1974 album Anima latina (Latin Soul), the collection of songs considered to be Battisti's most complex musical offering, which remained at number one in the Italian charts for 13 weeks, Battisti became something of a recluse, declining to make public appearances or give interviews, declaring his new belief that “an artist should communicate with the public only through his work”.

His partnership with Mogol broke up in 1981, an amicable split stemming from their diversion in styles as Battisti became interested in more experimental, electronic sounds. Nonetheless, his success continued, with three more chart-topping albums, including Don Giovanni (1986), for which the poet Pasquale Panella wrote the lyrics. He also recorded some songs written by his wife, Grazia Letizia Veronese, who he had married in the late 1970s and with whom he had a son, Luca.

When Battisti died on 9 September 1998, aged only 55, the Italian music world was plunged into profound shock. It had become known in late August that he had been hospitalised in Milan, but his family respected his desire for privacy and issued no bulletins on his condition. The cause of his death was never officially confirmed, although it was thought to be the result either of a lymphoma that affected his liver, or a disease of the kidneys.

His passing was marked at a small private funeral in Molteno, the hilltop town in the beautiful Brianza area between Milan and Lake Como where he had lived since the early 1970s. There were just 20 guests, including Mogol, who had for a while occupied a neighbouring villa. 

Pigneto has undergone a revival recently and
now has a thriving cafe culture

Travel tip:

Battisti’s home growing up in Rome, Piazzale Prenestina, is an area dominated by the convergence of multiple rail tracks leading to Roma Termini station and an elevated section of Rome’s orbital motorway, the Grande Raccordo Anulare. It lies at the entrance to Pigneto, an area once largely working class and industrial that has evolved in recent years into a trendy neighbourhood of alternative shops, vintage stores, and diverse bars and restaurants, popular with students. The area was badly bombed during World War II, as a consequence of which it was chosen by the director Roberto Rossellini for location shooting for his neorealist classic, Roma Città Aperta - Rome, Open City. The district was a favourite, too, of another director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. 

A steep staircase leads to Molteno's
Chiesa di San Giorgio

Travel tip:

Battisti’s home in northern Italy - he also kept an apartment in Rome and a villa in Rimini - was in Molteno, a small town about 35km (22 miles) northeast of Milan, about equidistant between the lakes of Como and Lecco in Brianza, an area of natural beauty. The town itself, originally built on the site of a Roman settlement, fans out from Piazza Risorgimento, at the foot of il Ceppo - the summit of the town - from which the parish church of San Giorgio oversees the surrounding area. Battisti’s villa was at Dosso di Coroldo, a hamlet just outside Molteno. Battisti was said to be a frequent diner at Ristorante Riva in Via Roma, where he and Mogol would often meet up with other musicians, many of them famous names in Italy at the time, to enjoy the food and wine and sometimes give impromptu performances.

Also on this day:

1696: The birth of painter and printmaker Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

1827: The death of scientist Alessandro Volta

1834: The birth of soprano Marietta Piccolomini

1922: The birth of film director Pier Paolo Pasolini

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