The ships are leaving For lands far away. They sing on board and are Neapolitan. They sing while in the sunset the bay disappears and the moon, above the sea lets them see a glimpse of Naples.
Santa Lucia far away from you what melancholy! We circle the whole world, we go to seek our fortunes, but when the moon rises, far away from Naples you cannot stay.
And they play...but their hands tremble on the strings. How many memories, how many memories. And my heart cannot heal not even with those songs; hearing those voices and that music, It begins to cry because it wants to return!
Santa Lucia far away from you what melancholy! We circle the whole world, we go to seek our fortunes, but when the moon rises far away from Naples you cannot stay.
Santa Lucia, yours is only a little sea. But the longer I stay away, the more beautiful you are! It is like the songs of the sirens that is still casting its net. My heart doesn't want riches if it was born in Naples, it wants to die there.
Santa Lucia far away from you what melancholy! We circle the whole world, we go to seek our fortunes, but when the moon rises far away from Naples you cannot stay.
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Santa Lucia LuntanaBy Web Editor. Filed under Feature Articleson March 23rd, 2005
This article is exclusive to Italy Magazine Online
Songs that beckon everyone to Naples
In the decades that span the turn of the 20th century millions of Italians left their homeland to seek a better life in countries across the Atlantic. Many of them were Neapolitans who set sail from what is known to this day in Naples as the King Umberto I Pier.
The emigrants didn’t have a lot of baggage. They carried with them above all the memories of their dear home country, blended with the flavors of their simple cooking and the sound of their songs. And it was precisely that cooking and those songs that revealed to the 20th-century world another Italy – made up not only of ancient ruins and high art, but also of simple people, happy to live in a culture handed down within the family, in the gestures and experiences of everyday life.
Neapolitans have always loved to express the images and feelings of their life through the medium of song. It’s similar to what has happened with the Nativity Scene – another great Neapolitan tradition – into which this people infuses images of its life and the neighborhoods of its city.
Popular song in Naples has ancient origins – as ancient as the “Maschio Angioino” Fortress or the university founded in 1224 by Frederick II of Swabia, which bears his name. In those days Naples was already a very big city, with 35,000 inhabitants. Frederick was determined to make it a fully-fledged capital, enacting decrees and regulations to promote cultural exchange and attract foreign scholars. From this period date the first documented songs: the fragment of a “Hymn to the Sun” (“Inno al Sole”) and the “Song of the Washerwomen of the Vomero” (Canto delle Lavandaie del Vomero”), which is still well-known and loved in Naples. It recalls the time when the women of the common people went to do the wash for well-to-do, noble families. It sometimes happened that the linens, all white without exception, got mixed up and changed hands. The song is in fact a merry dispute over four handkerchiefs gone astray.
Things changed under the Angevins, who were in Naples for 200 years until the second half of the 15th century, ruling with a heavy hand. They exploited the city and its inhabitants, behaving so scandalously that they were excommunicated by the Pope. In that period the Neapolitans used songs as satire to hold up to public ridicule actions that surely did no honor to the rulers. Little remains of this material, too closely bound to its time. It must be kept in mind that nothing was written and that both words and music were handed down orally. So when the songs were no longer topical, people stopped singing them and they were lost.
Things went differently for the villanella, a musical genre born in Naples in the first decades of the 16th century that rapidly spread throughout Europe. This was a brief musical composition, really the most direct precursor of the modern popular song. Free of religious content, the villanella sang for the most part of love for a young maiden and the beauties of nature. Born as spontaneous songs, composed and performed in the streets, villanelle nevertheless immediately found a place in the repertoire of court singers who transcribed them in manus. It is thanks to those manus, surviving to this day, that the villanelle are not lost and forgotten.
Many musicians and poets of the time turned their hand to the villanella, sometimes straying far from the original spontaneity of the genre toward a more literary style. Yet there are some very beautiful examples, like the famous “Villanella che all’acqua vai” or “Voccuccia de ‘no pierzeco”. The words were generally written in Neapolitan, which was considered a language in its own right. The Belgian composer Orlando di Lasso, who lived for many years in Naples as resident musician in a noble family, learned the language to write his highly regarded villanelle.
By the early years of the 17th century this genre had already gone out of fashion – but popular songs were still being composed and handed down spontaneously. From a simple opening theme, the songs spread on their own and the people who heard them went on inventing new phrases and rhythms for them. In this way, the author - or rather, authors - remained for the most part unknown. It is due only to the passion and dedication of the researchers in this area that we can still sing or hear exceptionally beautiful pieces like “Fenesta ca’ lucive”, “O gauarracino”, “Michelemmà”, “Fenesta vascia” and many others. In fact, these songs, from the 17th or 18th century – but sometimes even earlier – received regular tranion and publication only in the 19th century. It was then, under the impetus of Romanticism across Europe, that researchers developed an interest in folk tales and folk songs, looking to find in them ancient sources of national identity.
Particularly important in Naples was the work of Guglielmo Cottrau, a Frenchman who settled there as a boy in the wake of Gioacchino Murat. Cottrau collected and published many dozens of beautiful songs (through his own publishing house), saving them from oblivion. Of course, we will never know who really composed them. Often the attribution for a song is “Anonymous” or the name of the person who transcribed it after hearing it performed by someone else.
The first song for which we know the author of the lyrics is “Te voglio bene assaje,” which dates from 1839. As is frequently the case with popular poets, this one was not a man of letters. His name was Raffaele Sacco and he was an optician. His shop still stands today in via Capitelli, in the heart of Naples, and everything there hearkens back to his song. Nothing precise is known about the composer of the music, even though some would trace it to Gaetano Donizetti. In fact, this is only a very vague conjecture.
Apart from love, the most frequent element in Neapolitan song is the sea. Inspired by its natural beauty, poets both popular and cultured forged evocative images, as in “Marechiaro” by Salvatore di Giacomo (1885), or “O’ marenariello” by Gennaro Ottaviano (1893). Even the very famous “Santa Lucia”, which in 1848 became the first Neapolitan song to have lyrics in Italian as well, has ties to the sea. It is, in fact, the invitation of a boatman to take a turn in his boat the better to enjoy the cool of the evening.
Still, love remains the dominant theme in Neapolitan songs. The classic settings for love in the 18th and 19th centuries were the window and the balcony, appearing frequently in titles and lyrics. This is because there was a custom of singing serenades beneath the window of the lady being courted, who sometimes responded with a nod from above. In addition to the already mentioned “Fenesta Vascia” and “Fenesta ca lucive” (fenesta is the Neapolitan equivalent of Italian finestra: “window”) there comes to mind the wonderful “Scètate”, the passionate serenade written in 1887 by the poet and journalist Ferdinando Russo. But even in “Marechiaro” the poet writes, “scètate Caruli ca l’aria è doce” – “Wake up, Caroline, for the air is sweet” – after having clearly said, “a Marechiare ce sta ‘na fenesta…passa l’acqua pe’ sott’ e murmulea” – “In Marechiaro there is a window…the water passes beneath and murmurs”.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the scene seems to shift to the garden. That’s where Salvatore di Giacomo sets his “Era di maggio”. And Vincenzo Russo, the semi-literate poet who wrote “I’ te vurria vasa’”, one of the most significant texts in the entire Neapolitan repertoire, sings of its colours and fragrances as the splendid setting in which to place his lady love. It’s the year 1900. A few years earlier, in 1898, a school teacher who wrote song lyrics to round out his meagre salary teamed up with a strolling singer to compose a very beautiful piece that quickly travelled around the world, becoming the symbol of Italy and an emblem of national identity for all the Italians who for more than two decades had been leaving their homeland. It was “O’ sole mio”, without doubt the Italian song that would remain the best known in the world for more than half a century. It wasn’t until 1958, when Domenico Modugno came out with “Nel blu dipinto di blu”, that another song would match its popularity.
As the 20th century got underway, cafés and cabarets began to sprout all over Naples. Places like the famous Gambrinus become at nightfall the meeting place of artists and poets, fertile ground for new musical ideas. Even the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who lived in Naples for two years, was a regular customer at Gambrinus. It was there, to win a bet with the poet Ferdinando Russo, that he wrote a poem in Neapolitan that he called “’A vucchella”. It was set to music by Francesco Paolo Tosti and quickly became part of the repertoire of the leading opera singers of the day.
But while the songs became increasingly the property of famous singers who performed in theatres and concert halls, the tradition of the strolling singers, or posteggiatori, remained very much alive. Accompanied by a few string instruments (guitars and mandolins), they performed in restaurants and in the streets. Generally, they were organised in small family groups in which each member had his own role of musician or singer. Some of them travelled outside Naples to other Italian cities or were even invited abroad to perform for wealthy families. In this way, they helped bring Neapolitan song to the attention of a wider audience.
Even the great tenor Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) began his career as a street singer – and it was precisely in that role that he caught the attention of the person who made him take formal singing lessons. When, already famous, he moved to New York in 1903, he became the most notable ambassador of Neapolitan song in the New World.
Caruso was succeeded by another remarkable tenor, Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957) who, accompanied by the pianist and composer Ernesto De Curtis, carried the song around the world. In any case, thanks to the emigrants, it was already well known and admired in almost every corner of their host countries. In 1911 an emigrant from Calabria named Alessandro Sisca, who had founded an Italian language newspaper in New York (La follia di New York), became the first to write a Neapolitan song overseas. It was “Core ‘Ngrato”, set to music by a Neapolitan composer named Salvatore Cardillo, who had also settled in the United States. The song became very famous in a short time – and in that same year it was also published in Milan, a musical migration in reverse.
But the song destined to become the symbol of all those who left Italy in search of a better life was “Santa Lucia Luntana,” written by E. A. Mario in 1919. The lyrics are emblematic: in a few verses they depict the feelings of those who set sail with no prospect of return. Sung by the emigrants with their cardboard suitcases or by great singers like Gigli and Caruso, the song recounts the experience of a people and of a city that for many people around the world still represents all of Italy.
Angela Cingottini
Translated from the original by John Guerrini
A Note on the Author
Angela Cingottini has taught Italian for the past 20 years at the University for Foreigners in Siena. She divides her time between linguistics and musicology, lecturing and giving courses on the history of Italian song and the opera at universities in Italy and abroad.
She is an active contributor to the videomagazine “Tendenze Italiane”. Among the features she has produced for this multimedia publication is “Santa Lucia luntana, un viaggio per Napoli attraverso la canzone,” a tour of Naples through its songs (“Tendenze Italiane” number 7, 2001).
The ships are leaving For lands far away. They sing on board and are Neapolitan. They sing while in the sunset the bay disappears and the moon, above the sea lets them see a glimpse of Naples.
Santa Lucia far away from you what melancholy! We circle the whole world, we go to seek our fortunes, but when the moon rises, far away from Naples you cannot stay.
And they play...but their hands tremble on the strings. How many memories, how many memories. And my heart cannot heal not even with those songs; hearing those voices and that music, It begins to cry because it wants to return!
Santa Lucia far away from you what melancholy! We circle the whole world, we go to seek our fortunes, but when the moon rises far away from Naples you cannot stay.
Santa Lucia, yours is only a little sea. But the longer I stay away, the more beautiful you are! It is like the songs of the sirens that is still casting its net. My heart doesn't want riches if it was born in Naples, it wants to die there.
Santa Lucia far away from you what melancholy! We circle the whole world, we go to seek our fortunes, but when the moon rises far away from Naples you cannot stay.
