Cesare Andrea Bixio wrote Parlami d'amore Mariù in 1932 for the film Gli uomini, che mascalzoni..., where it was sung on screen by Vittorio De Sica, then a young leading man rather than the director he later became. Ennio Neri supplied the words. The song was recorded before the film opened and became the first Italian film song to sell on a large scale, establishing a pattern Bixio repeated for the next two decades. He wrote more than four hundred songs and never learned to read music fluently.