He is a ghost that continues to sell Italianness. The contour of the mustache surgically shaved, the tarantella in the gestures, the arms always openthe attitude in excess, the gesture to the extreme.
Domenico Modugno, the invisible and exaggerated sign, as it has been exaggerated throughout his life, is still the symbol, the memory of the Bel Paese. A hymn to excess.
In 2014, ten years after his heart stopped in the garden of his house in Lampedusa, his remains ceased to rest in peace. They were brought to light at the request of justice.
A group of experts took a DNA sample from the corpse of the father of the modern Italian song in what should have been a potential scandal. The millionaire legacy of Mr. “Volare” could include a new heir, who was not unknown and that he would have dedicated a quarter of his life to arrive at the truth: the actor Fabio Camilli.
If Domenico’s life offered fictional chapters with the famous melody of Made in Italy – more exported than spaghetti -, his post mortem years have surpassed the cinematic fantasy. Even a cursed pandemic had its spirit around the Italian balconies as doctors and nurses were cheered: his hymn was redefined as the poetry of resistance
He died 28 years ago, but left behind a hymn considered one of the most intense insignia in the worlda song that remains among the most listened to on the planet, with tireless reversals and peaks on Spotify.
Singing songs (In the blue painted blue)better known to the public as i will fly, is a tribute to life, to dreams, to restart, to paradise, to infinity. It is a simple letter, almost a thought aloud, that the mayor of Polignano a Mare, the city where “Signor Volare” was born, explains: “In 1958 he represented the economic recovery of a post-war nation and before the coronavirus it represented the same thing.
Revolutionary, from Bari, son of a policeman, the craftsman of song was born on January 9, 1928 in a family who advised him “settle down with decent workHe decided to fly from payments and arrived overflowing with dreams first at Torino (then at Roma), with a very heavy accordion, but with an empty suitcase, “like a great child of misery”.
His focus was not understood at the beginning, he had a first artistic vocation, cinema, and he studied at the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Rome, to get to act under Vittorio De Sica. After several “no”, with his southern dialect he ended up conquering music. His big initial goal was his victory at the Sanremo Festival 1958.
Grammy winner that year, when the award was first releasedthe United States surrendered to his capricious song and that open-arms legend that ended up selling more than 22 million copies to the cry of Into the blue... Evidence of the gringo crush was his performances The Ed Sullivan show and Carnegie Hall
There was also a spell on this side of the map: has visited Argentina half a dozen times since 1959, with presentations at the Opera, in Pipo Mancera’s Circular Saturdays or on the old Channel 11.
The newspapers of the time reported it as another porteño, friend of actor and singer Pato Carret, smiling with Ethel Rojo and Amadeo Carrizo, obsessed with Argentine chorizo steak, hearts of palm and the overflowing canteens of La Boca, Spadavecchia and La Cueva de Zingarella. He even took the Corrientes Street stage in a Cirano de Bergerac.
At these latitudes he wept bravely in front of journalists from radiolandia: when he had managed to move to a building with 15 thousand meters of park and success had embraced him, the big dagger arrived: his father’s suicide, Cosimo, in 1965.
Tire Salesman and Waiter Before Reaching Glory, a biographical book (The legend of Mister will fly, by Maurizio Ternavasio) tells in part the social rise through popular art. But some of that history he tried to hide to safeguard his good name.
the son of silence
“Imagine you are 25 and you discover that one of your best friends is your brother. And that your father is Domenico Modugno”. With this slogan, a RAI pilot presented Fabio Camilli, 60, a series and film actor.
“One day while I was in the military hospital I called my house and they told me that an ex-girlfriend, Silvia, was looking for me urgently”, Camilli began his story. he fought legally for 18 years to reclaim his identity. “I contact her and she confesses that in the last period she had started a relationship with a friend of mine, Marcello. I tell her that there is no problem, but she tells me that that was not the problem but that Marcello had confided in her that he and I were brothers. My mother (Maurizia Cali) and her father had had an affair and in the end I was Modugno’s son. “
“At first it seemed like a joke. Then thinking about a whole series of memories, I realized something. I realized that the hatred my (adoptive) father had for me was at least a suspicion … I didn’t have a very happy childhood emotionally. I found the strength to move forward and emotional spaces beyond the family. I trusted my friends and I discovered that everyone knew this, because after all they are the secrets of Pulcinella. I wrote a letter to my mother and then we confronted each other. It was difficult to put her on the spot, her report confirmed it to me, she didn’t know if I was really Modugno’s son ”.
“I had to fight to be able to tell who my father was. It was a tiring and tiring journey “.confessed the renamed Fabio Modugno. Now in marital status he is registered as the singer’s fourth child. The other three were born from the relationship with Franca Gandolfi, his companion for 43 years, who appears as the great love in the RAI miniseries I will fly.
Modugno Jr. 4 has decided to publish his truth in a book, Step brothers (Stepbrothers), as I found out he was Modugno’s son. The story is based on that summer afternoon of 1987 when, learning the secret, Fabio discovers a story of family hypocrisy, misery under the carpet and unbridled passion between the Italian “king” and his choreographer and dancer.
Just married, Modugno was expecting his first child from his “legal” wife, but he fell in love with the athletic redhead. The setting: the Sixties, a too Catholic country that mercilessly identified the “sinner” and had “the example of morals and good morals” in Modugno.
Hemiplegia, the wheelchair and decline
After in July 1957, in Rome, Franco Migliacci (one of the two authors of Into the blue…) had a sudden inspiration when he woke up, everything seemed like luck. Legend has it that the first thing Migliacci saw at dawn was the painting by Chagall Le coq rouge dans la nuit, hanging on the wall and the blue color broke into his mind. So he joined Modugno and they shaped the verses that triggered that image.
Alias ”Mimmo” has not fully lived his last years. In 1984, at the age of 57, as he appeared on a television channel, sleepy and overworked, he felt ill. He ended up hospitalized for a thrombosis.
What followed were weeks of intensive care and coma, hemiplegia and neurological rehabilitation treatment. He was forced to live the rest of his days in a wheelchair. His body looked like a prisoner, with a limited corset, but his spirit managed to escape. “I try to move my leg, but she doesn’t want to move”, he complained and elaborated the musical duel: “I can’t play the guitar anymore because of the clumsiness of my hand.”
In 1974 he had slipped into the world of politics, he had participated in the campaign for the “divorce” of the socialists. Later he was deputy and leader of the Italian Radical Party. “Now sing i will fly Pavarotti and I are dedicated to other things, “he joked.
The artist who dined with Federico Fellini, to whom the Beatles shook hands, to whom Paul McCartney honored i will fly and was restored by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, it faded as the tributes poured in and its voice became the official takeoff and landing song for the airline Alitalia.
“He died before his sea, the one he loved so much”, he told his widow -Franca- about his end at six in the afternoon on August 6, 1994, in his refuge in the Bay of Rabbits, on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. She had a debt: “Return a cured turtle to the sea” together with the organization she collaborated with, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
“Distance is like the wind, turn off the small fire, but turn on the big one “, he sang and he knew it: he could die, but he had already left too big a fire.
Source: Clarin
