“Le facce nere del festival”: Black Musicians at Sanremo in the 1960s

This article explores the history of Black musicians at the Sanremo Music Festival during the 1960s, as the festival sought to reach international markets and bolster Italy’s recording and publishing industries. Over that decade, artists including Louis Armstrong, Dionne Warwick, Wilson Pickett, Shirley Bassey, and Eartha Kitt performed at Sanremo, raising critical questions about the festival’s role as a cultural venue where racial categories and hierarchies in Italy are constructed and negotiated. Drawing on musicological analysis and archives of some of Italy’s most prominent newspapers and magazines (La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Radiocorriere TV, and others), this article argues that the Italian public theorized a Black musicality distinct from a (white) Italian musical aesthetic. The dual performances of canzone italiana (Italian song) that characterized the festival during much of the 1960s enabled these comparisons, as performances translated songs not only linguistically but also culturally and racially. Journalists often wrote about the Black musicians in ways that highlighted their Blackness and their difference musically, visually, and, as it concerned Black women, sexually, invoking the colonial trope of the Venere nera (Black Venus). Ultimately, by examining this foundational period, the article demonstrates how Sanremo provided a public space to negotiate questions of race, belonging, and italianità (Italianness), indirectly engaging with Italy’s often overlooked history of colonialism and Fascism. The article concludes by linking the legacy of these artists to the cultural politics of Black Italian music today.