Torna a Surriento

Torna a Surriento was written by the brothers De Curtis — Ernesto the music, Giambattista the words — and registered with the Italian copyright office in 1905, though the family later claimed the melody dated from 1894. The story attached to it is that it was composed at Sorrento for a visit by the prime minister Giuseppe Zanardelli, as part of a campaign to get the town a post office; the documentary basis for that is thin. The song became one of the few Neapolitan numbers that every touring tenor of the twentieth century carried.