Sunday Feature: O Sole Mio

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O Sole Mio

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, O Sole Mio

On the streets of Naples, Joanna Robertson celebrates the city's unique musical tradition.

The city of Naples has a unique heritage of unforgettable songs like O Sole Mio or Funiculi Funicula. Joanna Robertson travels to Naples to explore its extraordinary song culture.

“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according to which the city was created by the siren Partenope. Song has been woven into Neapolitan life ever since, giving the city an extraordinary musical culture and heritage. 

Joanna Robertson travels to Naples to find out what makes this city so full of song.  Walking around Naples, she hears singing in the least expected places: in the street, on the seafront, protesters at a demonstration singing rather than shouting their slogans. 

Song has permeated the culture of Naples for centuries. In the sixteenth century, when Neapolitans felt oppressed by their Spanish king, they created the villanella style of song as a form of protest. Its San Carlo opera theatre is the oldest in the world that's still in operation. Its brilliant nineteenth century impresario Domenico Barbaja attracted the likes of composers Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini to Naples. 

Poets – from the amateur to the famous – wrote poems that composers set to music, creating much-loved songs like O Sole Mio. Some were advertising jingles, like Funiculi Funicula which was written to promote the new funicular railway that ran up the slope of Vesuvius. 

Local-born baritone Ernesto Petti, a rising international opera star, says that “Neapolitan songs should be sung with complete abandonment. You put your whole heart in it." That's what the audience end up doing at a "Napulitanata" performance, taking over the singing of “O Sole Mio” from the artists. They know it all by heart.

Presenter: Joanna Robertson 
Producer: Arlene Gregorius
Sound engineer: James Beard
Production coordinator: Iona Hammond 
Editor: Penny Murphy

Recording of 'Santa Lucia Luntana' performed by Teresa Iervolino courtesy of Fondazione Pieta dei Turchini in Naples.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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