Musica Mia: Modern Italian Pop Music

Musica Mia, My Music is a little guide to Italian music available in the United States and imported from Italy. We have selected Italian music from Amazon.com featuring CDs from Italy like Festival of Sanremo and Greatest Hits by Italian singers and groups. You will also find a selection of websites that carry Italian MP3 songs and albums as well as iTunes of Italian artists. If you prefer to order directly from Italy, ibs.it will ship your Italian music, movies, books and video games anywhere in the world. We hope you'll enjoy Musica Mia and find it useful, we encourage you to suggest this site to your friends and to include it in your favorite websites. Grazie!

The Music of Italy

Italian CDs in USA

Amazon.com

CdUniverse.com

ArkivMusic Classical

Italian MP3, iTunes

Italian Radio

List of radio stations

Italian CDs from Italy

ibs.it musica italiana

Modern Italian Pop Music

Among the best-known Italian pop musicians of the last few decades are Domenico Modugno, Mina, Gianni Morandi, I Pooh, Adriano Celentano and, more recently, Zucchero, Vasco Rossi and Eros Ramazzotti.
Musicians who compose and sing their own songs are called cantautori (singer-songwriters). Their compositions typically focus on topics of social relevance and are often protest songs: this wave began in the 1960s with musicians like Fabrizio De André, Giorgio Gaber, Gino Paoli and Luigi Tenco.
Social, political, psychological and intellectual themes, mainly in the wake of Gaber and De André's work, became even more predominant in 1970s through authors such as Pino Daniele, Francesco De Gregori, Francesco Guccini, Antonello Venditti and Roberto Vecchioni.
At the same time Lucio Battisti, Angelo Branduardi and Franco Battiato pursued careers more oriented to the tradition of Italian pop music.
There is some genre cross-over between the cantautori and those who are viewed as singers of "protest music".
Film scores, although they are secondary to the film, are often critically acclaimed and very popular in their own right. Among early music for Italian films from the 1930s was the work of Riccardo Zandonai with scores for the films La Principessa Tarakanova (1937) and Caravaggio (1941).
Post-war examples include Goffredo Petrassi with Non c'e pace tra gli ulivi (1950) and Roman Vlad with Giulietta e Romeo (1954). Another well-known film composer was Nino Rota whose post-war career included the scores for films by Federico Fellini and, later, The Godfather series. Other prominent film score composers include Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani and Piero Umiliani.