1950s Italian music

June 10, 2005 9:50 AM

My SO & I were at a restaurant in Italy a couple of weeks ago where they were playing some wonderful old music.

The maitre d' (maestro di?) said it was a mixture his mama had made of Italian popular music from the 1950s (but not rock 'n' roll, I should hasten to add). I want to get some! The two songs I remember are a female singing (in Italian of course) "Three Coins in a Fountain", and that jaunty one that goes "La bella piccolina, la bella piccolina". Another typical example would be the original Italian version of "Volare". In essence, the songs had all the production values of the big band Sinatra/Dean Martin/Jo Stafford American songs of the era, but were in Italian. Anyone know where to start?

posted by TiredStarling to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

In the biggest old vinyl store you can find. Hopefully, it'll have a 'foreign' section, ideally with the records further categorized by country. Then, just select a couple of the 'Italy' records with the most promising and appealing 50s cover art.
posted by Rash at 2:42 PM on June 10, 2005

Amazon or Tower.com? They tend to be pretty good if you're just trying to track down a song. Then you can see which CDs have it.

HMV used to carry pretty good country-specific compilation CDs, as well, in their international section.

(I'm thinking of something like this, though I don't know this particular CD.)
posted by occhiblu at 2:45 PM on June 10, 2005

The original version of ‘Volare’ was by Domenico Mondugno. There's at least one CD of his music available from Amazon. That Amazon product page links to releases by some other artists which may well be in the same kind of style.
posted by misteraitch at 3:40 PM on June 11, 2005