The song Italy lent to the world.
It is 7 February 2026, and the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics is under way at the Milan Olympic Stadium. Drones blink above the blue floodlights, camera cranes rake the skyline, and a mosaic of glowing smartphones suggests that the world is tuning itself to the same channel, at least for one evening.
The stadium stills. A woman dressed in white and silver takes centre stage, like an ice sculpture that has learned to sing. The orchestra leans in, the tempo thick with romance, and only then do you recognise the song – Volare, sung by none other than Mariah Carey.
It is an odd, faintly comic, yet deeply moving choice. Here is Italy, showman of Europe, presenting its greatest unofficial national anthem – and hiring an American pop icon to sing it. Her accent is audible in every phrase, and you can hear her feeling her way through the Italian, reverent, but unmistakably foreign. It seems far removed from the versions you hear at Italian weddings, football matches or over tinny speakers in beach bars where the Aperol is more orange than the sunset. It’s worlds away from the Gipsy Kings, whose relentlessly cheerful, flamenco-inflected Volare has become the global default – not knowing whether it is Spanish, Italian or just generically Mediterranean.
The arrangement is slow, starry, all candlelight and soft focus. This is the blue of memory – the dream of a beautiful world that seems just out of reach. That longing – for escape, for flight, for a more beautiful version of the world – has been stitched into the song from the very beginning.
In the summer of 1957, Franco Migliacci is waiting for his friend Domenico Modugno to go to the coast. When Modugno fails to appear, Migliacci drinks a bottle of wine, falls asleep and drifts into an uneasy dream. When he wakes, he glimpses two Marc Chagall reproductions on the wall: a yellow man floating serenely in mid-air in Le coq rouge and the overriding blue hues of Le peintre et la modèle.
From this drunken collage comes his first sketch: a man who paints himself blue, dissolves into a blue sky, and, freed from gravity, begins to fly. Sogno in blu (A dream is blue) he calls it at first. That evening, Modugno finally turns up, and the two of them spend days reshaping the dream into a song. Some months later, Modugno is at home when a storm snaps open the window. The sky beyond is a furious, living blue. According to his widow, this is when he decides to change the chorus, to anchor the drifting dream with a single, shouted verb: Volare. To fly.
The rest is history. In 1958, Nel blu, dipinto di blu wins the Sanremo Music Festival, which feels both obvious and inevitable. A song about painting yourself blue and flying turns out to be exactly what a country recovering from war and poverty wishes to hear. Its victory sends it on to the third Eurovision Song Contest, held that year in Hilversum in the Netherlands. The Eurovision crown does not materialise; the song comes in third out of ten. Officially, this is not failure but not a triumph either: a decent showing, a polite bronze. In the long run, that third place may be the most spectacularly irrelevant result in the history of Eurovision. The jury moves on, but the world does not.
In August and September 1958, Modugno’s recording spends five non-consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. It becomes Billboard’s number-one single that year. Then come the Grammys. In 1959, at the very first edition of the awards, Modugno’s recording of Nel blu, dipinto di blu wins both Record of the Year and Song of the Year. No foreign-language song had managed that before, and none has achieved it since.
After that, Nel blu, dipinto di blu belongs to everyone. The Gipsy Kings, yes, but also stadiums where the song mutates into football chants; André Rieu’s waltzing violins; Jonas Kaufmann, Pavarotti, and the Three Tenors, who treat it like an encore smuggled in from a comic opera.
Back to modern-day Milan, where the stadium is washed in programmable cobalt; the cameras climb ever higher until the whole stadium looks like a glowing blue bowl set down in the dark.
In the VIP section, the American Vice President, who had already been audibly booed on introduction, sits through the performance facing a sea of blue light, listening to a song devoted entirely to disappearing into that colour – the colour precisely opposite the one usually associated with his politics.
Few songs would be better suited to the Olympics, an event that insists, against considerable evidence, that we might still gather peacefully under a handful of colours on a flag and believe in something larger than ourselves. For a few minutes in Milan, the stadium holds exactly that illusion: a night soaked in blue light, a melody about flying, a shared longing that the world outside the arena might one day feel as weightless and as generous, as this chorus.
The drones dim, the song ends and gravity returns quietly. But the image lingers: a blue evening, a crowd singing of flight and the old Chagall dream still circling above us, stubbornly refusing to land.
Florian Riem
