Vincenzo Di Chiara

La spagnola, the bolero for which Vincenzo Di Chiara supplied both music and text, was written for the Piedigrotta festival in Naples in 1906 and has carried his name across a century. Little else of his life is on record. The song belongs to the canzone napoletana at its commercial height, when publishers, café singers and annual festivals turned a regional repertoire into an international one; its words are in Italian rather than dialect, but it has the genre's melodic directness, poised verses opening into a broad refrain. Gigli and Claudio Villa recorded it, cinema took it up, and it survives in arrangements for almost every combination of instruments.