Al Bano and Romina Power

Some weeks ago my friend and I went to the cinema for an evening of light entertainment and we watched Book Club : the Next Chapter starring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen. The story isn’t very deep and is somewhat predictable but we had fun anyway. It is mostly set in Italy and at one point the ladies are in a helicopter and the song Felicità by Al Bano and Romina Power starts playing.

It caught me unawares and I felt myself tear up with nostalgia. Al Bano and Romina! Oh, how I had loved them between the ages of 12 to 14! They were my absolute favourites at the time.

These are two covers that I remember owning as cassette tapes and I used to play those cassettes all the time…

Al Bano was an actor and singer when, on a film set in Italy, he met a very young Romina Power, eldest daughter of Hollywood star Tyrone Power who had died by then.

I think she was something like 15, he was a few years older. They went their separate ways but a few years later reconnected and got married in 1970 when Romina was just 19 and pregnant with their first child.

They started singing together as a duo in the mid 1970s but I only became aware of them at the beginning of the 1980s and fell in love with them then. I had no clue what exactly they were singing, I just knew they were love songs and the love looked genuine and Romina was just so beautiful. He had this strong, beautiful voice and she was all softness and fun. I gobbled it all up.

They won the San Remo festival, the biggest music festival in Italy, in 1984 with the song Ci Sara. I still recall that white dress Romina wore and to this day when I hear that song, I think of her in that white dress.

One of my favourite songs at the time was Che Angelo Sei…

And of course Sharazan. Someone mixed different performances of that song into one video.

Sempre Sempre was a fun upbeat song I liked after I stopped following them so closely…

And Liberta was also a later hit that I am told was especially popular in Romania around the time that Ceaușescu fell in 1989. I don’t know if that’s true but I do like that thought.

I completely lost track of them at the end of the 1980s after I had moved to The Netherlands where there was much less news about them (they were far more popular in Germany than they had ever been in The Netherlands) and that was also the time when my music taste started to change. I “found” David Bowie around that time, which was a whole different kettle of fish. So, it wasn’t till the late 1990s that I learned about the disappearance of their eldest daughter Ylenia.

Ylenia was born in november 1970 (same year as me but I was born in april) and two and a half years later Al Bano and Romina also had a son named Yari. Then in the mid 1980s, around the time I was losing track of them, they had two more girls, first Cristel and then Romina. I have been leafing through my old diaries again and even mentioned the births of the girls at the time and stuck in pictures.

I wrote a lot about them in my diaries when I was in full on adoration mode as I couldn’t share my love for them with my friends and classmates. They were all into Wham and Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet and adoring Al Bano and Romina was absolutely not cool. So, my adoration was only known within my family and in my diary. All that is something for another post, however.

Anyway, back to Ylenia (I always loved that name)- she disappeared in New Orleans at the beginning of 1994 and, dreadfully, there has been no trace of her ever since.

Al Bano and Romina apparently stopped performing together to concentrate on searching for Ylenia and then over a year after Ylenia’s disappearance they released what was to be their final album together. I didn’t know of this album until recently and one track on that album, called Impossibile, is especially painful, about barely keeping it together and feeling very fragile. It’s hearbreaking to think from what place of pain that song must have originated.

Sadly, Al Bano and Romina were not able to overcome this tragedy together and in 1999 they separated. Romina has found solace in Buddhism, as has her son Yari, and still believes her daughter must be alive somewhere. Al Bano found a new partner and has two children with her but says he’ll never marry again. He filed to have his daughter declared dead in 2013.

They were not on good terms with each other for a long time but apparently when someone in Russia requested them for a concert, also in 2013, Romina agreed and reunited with Al Bano for a gig. Since then they have occasionally been performing together again and they seem to be friendly exes now.

In 1976 they performed a song called We’ll Live It All Again at the Eurovision Song Contest and came in 7th. It was a bit of a nostalgic, carefree song but when they perform it nowadays and start singing about living it all again, their first kiss and their first baby, the song hits very differently, knowing all they have been through and that they aren’t together anymore. In the following video, the two young women in the background are their younger two daughters, brunette Romina (in the black dress) and blond Cristel (in the red outfit).

Just hearing that one song, Felicita, in a movie has prompted me to go down memory lane again, listen to all their songs again, read up about them, watch videos with them and write this blog post. I had pretty much forgotten how very much I used to love them and how very much they used to mean to me. It has now all come flooding back again. Besides the joy of rediscovery, I also feel this great sadness for them when I think about the nightmares they have been living after their 1980s heydey. I am glad that they now at least seem friendly again together.

Most of their music wouldn’t be my music of choice nowadays but for nostalgia’s sake I have loved listening to them a lot again. My daughter heard some of it in the car with me and she commented that she thought some of it sounded a bit like Italian ABBA. And she likes ABBA, so there’s that. Should they by any chance be doing a concert again, maybe in Germany, then I probably should go see them. I wonder if I ever will have that chance… In the meantime, it’s nice to listen to them again and to realize how many lyrics I can still sing along to (phonetically) without really knowing what it actually is I am singing exactly. It’s been fun doing this Italo-pop deep dive.