There is a particular kind of Italian summer song that does not try very hard to be profound. It just wants you to feel the heat on your skin and the sea somewhere close by. Peppino di Capri, who died on his home island on the 11th of July, aged 86, made more of these than almost anyone else in Italian popular music. And one of the loveliest of them, „Fiore di carta,“ is this week’s Sunny Side Up soul spotlight.
A child prodigy on a war-scarred island
Giuseppe Faiella was born on Capri in 1939, into a family of musicians, and his talent showed up almost absurdly early. By age four, during the Second World War, he was already playing piano for the Allied troops stationed on the island.
It is one of those origin stories that sounds slightly too good to be true, and yet by every account it is exactly true: a small boy at a piano, charming soldiers a very long way from home, on an island that would soon become one of the most glamorous corners of postwar Europe, largely because of him.
The man who sold out the Beatles
Di Capri grew up performing in the nightclubs of Capri and Ischia, and by the late 1950s he was becoming a genuine phenomenon. His 1962 recording of „Let’s Twist Again“ topped the Italian charts for thirty-two weeks and remains his best-selling record.
He was, by several accounts, one of the primary reasons Italian promoters put his name on the bill for the Beatles’ 1965 tour dates in Italy, his fame at the time was reportedly used to help sell tickets to a band that had not yet fully conquered the country. He would go on to win the Sanremo Festival twice, in 1973 and 1976, and appear there a record fifteen times across his career, returning as recently as 2023 for an emotional lifetime achievement tribute.
A Bee Gees ballad, reborn in Italian
By 1978, when „Fiore di carta" appeared on his album"Verdemela“, di Capri was well into the second act of his career: no longer the twist revolutionary, but an elegant chansonnier with an unmistakable touch on the piano.
The song is his Italian-language adaptation of the Bee Gees’ „How Deep Is Your Love,“ with new lyrics by Mimmo Di Francia and Sergio Iodice, and it is a small masterclass in what di Capri did better than almost anyone: taking something international and pop and folding it, without any visible seam, into something that sounds completely, unmistakably Italian. It has the same tenderness as the original, but it carries a different light, warmer, more golden, closer to the Bay of Naples than to the Bee Gees’ falsetto disco sheen.
Why this one, this week?
There is something quietly fitting about spotlighting this particular song right now. It is, on its own terms, a song about summer light and fragile, paper-thin love, the kind of record that has soundtracked Italian holidays for nearly fifty years. And it happens to have been made by a man who, more than almost any other Italian artist of his generation, was himself a kind of embodiment of the Italian summer: elegant, warm, endlessly hummable, tied inseparably to one particular stretch of coastline.
If you enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s coming-of-age stories of adolescence in southern Italy, think of di Capri’s music as their soundtrack, sun-warmed on top, aching underneath. Di Capri never really left Capri, and Capri, in turn, gave the world „Champagne,“ „Roberta,“ and this song, among dozens of others.
Goodbye to a legend?
He passed away at Villa Castiglione, his home on the island, after a long illness. His funeral was held in the church of Santo Stefano in Capri’s main piazzetta, the same square where, as a small boy, he first sat down at a piano in front of an audience. Tributes poured in from across Italian music and public life; Italy’s culture ministry announced it would dedicate part of the campaign for UNESCO recognition of Neapolitan song to his memory.
„Fiore di carta“ will not be the song most people remember him for. That will likely always be „Champagne“ or „Let’s Twist Again.“ But it captures something just as true about him: a musician who spent sixty years making other people’s holidays feel a little more golden.