What’s Behind the Title: A Song and a Dark Mystery
Luigi Tenco: A strange end to a strange life and whose song inspired the title of the novel.
Have you listened to the Ciao Amore, Ciao soundtrack on Spotify yet? If not, you can listen here … and I might even dive into the background of some of these remarkable songs in future blog posts.
For this blog, I want to talk about the song that inspired the title to this novel—Ciao Amore, Ciao (note the comma)—because it’s one that is steeped in a bleak history involving suicide, murder, drugs, vanished footage … and a forbidden affair that, well, probably wasn’t.
A haunting song that captures the very spirit of the novel
Ciao Amore, Ciao was a song by Luigi Tenco. Legend has it that he really didn’t much like it. The song itself went through a half-dozen versions and revisions before Tenco settled on the version we all know and love today. But even when it was finalised, Tenco refused to perform it, and was only persuaded to do so for the first time at the Sanremo Festival in 1967 by Dalida, an Italian-French singer and actress with whom he’d been having something of a torrid affair.
The two had met in Paris in the summer of 1966, and by the time the Sanremo Festival rolled along in January of 1967, they were—or so the papers suggested at the time—deeply in love. A love that would be open for the world to see at the Sanremo Festival when they would both perform Ciao Amore, Ciao for the first time.
The song, however, fared poorly at Sanremo. It didn’t even make it through the first rounds. Which was a huge surprise of course, given Dalida and Tenco were already household names at that point.
Rumours of “match fixing” (by Tenco himself, no less) quickly spread, but in truth, his performance—his final performance, as it turned out—was a weirdly disjointed rendition. Many believe Tenco was under the influence of drugs that night (he was notoriously anxious before live performances), and Dalida was allegedly miffed backstage after his performance.
The visual recording is long gone—adding further fire to the mystery of his death—though a radio broadcast of the performance does survive. The lost (and last) performance of Luigi Tenco has, of course, been subject of a half-century worth of musical sleuthing, including an unlikely Polish connection, but that recording—that was filmed live on TV—has vanished entirely from the archives. Odd, when you consider every other performance from that night remains accessible both in RAI archives and even online.
What we do know is that Tenco, after the performance, was not in good humour. Grumbling about the Festival being fixed and feeling unwell, he retired to his hotel room, where he was found dead that same night—in the early hours of 27 January 1967—under bizarre circumstances.
Tenco and Dalida at Sanremo in 1967. He had hours to live.
A gunshot wound to the head from a Walther PPK
The circumstances surrounding his death were so suspicious that his case has been reopened twice in subsequent years. It’s a case that still engenders headlines in Italy, 60-plus years after his death.
Suspicions of murder rather than suicide took root that night and have never really subsided. There are many reasons why some will always believe Tenco was murdered that night: A robbery gone wrong (Tenco won almost 3 million lira at the roulette table the night before, but the money was never found after his death): A crime passionnel featuring Dalida’s possessive ex, Morisse, who was spotted exiting Tenco’s hotel room the night Tenco was found dead: To stop Tenco from revealing the bribery and corruption that he claimed was behind the Sanremo Music Festival.
Whatever happened that night, the result was that Italy lost one of its most unique talents. A leading light of the cantautori era—musicians who wrote, recorded, and performed their own music that was often steeped in politics and the passions of the time—Luigi Tenco retains, to this day, a deep following and has gone on to join the pantheon of dead Italian artists from that era (such as Pasolini, he too a victim of a strange murder).
Dalida would wear this dress at Sanremo. And then she’d wear it once more, before her abortive suicide attempt in Paris some weeks later.
And what happened to Dalida? Before going on to a massive career and selling half-a-million albums, she was invited onto French TV less than two weeks after Tenco’s death, in February of 1967. She performed a truly haunting rendition of Ciao Amore, Ciao, in French, for the TV show Palmarès des Chansons, wearing the same long black dress she had worn at Sanremo. After the show, she checked in to the same hotel where she and Tenco had fallen in love and took an overdose of barbiturates.
She somehow survived after being in a coma for over a week
That was the official version, anyway. In subsequent years, it turned out that Tenco had been having a close affair with another woman, and she produced letters that stated his “affair” with Dalida was nothing more than publicity for their mutual careers. Indeed, Tenco in the letters is far from flattering in his view of Dalida. The truth? It vanished with Tenco in room 219 at the Hotel Savoy in Sanremo.
Which leaves us with the song Ciao Amore, Ciao. RCA distributed 80,000 copies of Ciao Amore, Ciao a week after Sanremo. The entire run was sold out by January 30. The song would go on to sell over half a million units by the summer of ’67 and would become the song for which Tenco would forever be remembered.
Quite the irony given his antipathy to it …
And that was that.
To truly grasp why Tenco was such a unique artist, here’s a better rendition of this iconic song.
Don’t forget to pre-order Ciao, Amore, Ciao by Sandro Martini from wherever you buy your books and we’ll see each other next time. Also, you can subscribe to the newsletter and enjoy exclusive book giveaways and other cool things.