Maruzzella roberto murolo biography
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Roberto Murolo was a musical institution, both in his home of Napoles and all of Italy, during the middle and second half of the 20th century. The son of poet Ernesto Murolo and the former Lia Cavalli, he was born in 1912 and showed a strong interest in music from an early age, especially singing and playing the guitar, at which he became extremely proficient. He spent his early professional years as a member of a quartet, with which he performed away from Italy from 1939 through 1946. His solo career -- focused almost exclusively on Neopolitan song, traditional and popular alike, began with his return to Italy in 1946. In addition to establishing himself as a concert artist and a popular figure on radio, with his romantic, sentimental sound, he also did some acting in movies, appearing in the 1953 crime drama The Counterfeiters, made in Italy by director Franco Rossi. Murolo became virtually a cultural ambassador from Naples to the world, and it was because of his recordings and performances that Neopolitan song was spread across five other continents. He was very conscious of the history of music in Naples, and his own repertoire came to encompass songs from across several centuries of Neopolitan music, going back to 16th century comic opera and even further, to the end of t
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Canzone napoletana
Genre of music related to the musical tradition of Naples
Canzone napoletana (Italian:[kanˈtsoːnenapoleˈtaːna]; Neapolitan: canzona napulitana[kanˈdzoːnənapuliˈtɑːnə]), sometimes referred to as Neapolitan song, is a generic term for a traditional form of music sung in the Neapolitan language, ordinarily for the male voice singing solo, although well represented by female soloists as well, and expressed in familiar genres such as the love song and serenade. Many of the songs are about the nostalgic longing for Naples as it once was.[1] The genre consists of a large body of composed popular music—such songs as "'O sole mio"; "Torna a Surriento"; "Funiculì, Funiculà"; "Santa Lucia" and others.
The Neapolitan song became a formal institution in the 1830s due to an annual song-writing competition for the Festival of Piedigrotta, dedicated to the Madonna of Piedigrotta, a well-known church in the Mergellina area of Naples. The winner of the first festival was a song entitled "Te voglio bene assaje"; it is traditionally attributed to the prominent opera composer Gaetano Donizetti, although an article published in 1984 by Marcello Sorce Keller shows there is no historical evidence in support of the attribution.[2] Th