An enigmatic song

At some point in the late 1970's, during a family visit to Rome, I remember my parents pausing in the middle of a hot sunny street to buy an (audio) cassette from a street vendor. Like most Maltese families of the period, a trip abroad was seen as a kind of Odyssey from which the traveller was expected to return with stories to tell about the strange customs encountered and full of presents for every single member of the extended family. "Let's buy a cassette of Domenico Modugno for Zio Johnny", my Mum exclaimed, "you know how he likes this music".

Domenico Modugno

The cassette was duly purchased and given. Twenty years later, after my beloved uncle was dead and buried, I inherited it and started listening to it. The technology had already been rendered outdated by cd players, but I felt the muffled distorted sound connected me with my past and as a budding anthropologist I relished the sense that I was tapping into a rich vein of heady poetic, folklore-inspired music. The songs were full of sunlight, freedom, melancholy and delivered with gusto. The messages were usually obvious, but none the worse for that. Only one song proved difficult to figure out...the most beautiful of the lot. The subject was clearly romantic love, but the lyrics seemed enigmatic and contradictory; at one point passionate and intense (I would be eternally damned if I did not love you) and in the very next breath philosophically resigned (all my foolish love I blow away to the sky). For years I tried to ignore this, but still it niggled at my mind.     

To be continued...