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Il centro del mondo — Ligabue: Italian vocabulary & story · Verbomatico

Il centro del mondo

by Ligabue

Language: Italian
Released: 2008
Genre: pop rock
Level: A2-
Difficulty score: 533
Duration: 4:14

How to study this song

“Il centro del mondo” carries 18 Italian words, 7 adjectives and 14 verb forms — 39 study entries in all, graded A2-. Work through the glossary first: centro, mondo and tempo are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 14 distinct forms against 7 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

IT	EN	ES	FR	PT	NL	DE
centro	centre	centro	centre	centro	centrum	Zentrum

Adjectives

IT	EN	ES	FR	PT	NL	DE
primo	first (m. sg.)	primero	premier	primeiro	eerste	erster (m. Sg.)

Verb forms

IT	EN	ES	FR	PT	NL	DE
portami	take me	llévame	emmène-moi	leva-me	neem me mee	bring mich

What this song teaches you

Level · A2-

Vocabulary words: 18
Adjectives: 7
Word combos: 7
Expressions: 10
Verb forms: 14
Quiz questions: 35

Background

About the song

«Il centro del mondo» arrived on 9 May 2008 as the first of three brand-new songs written for «Secondo tempo», the second half of Luciano Ligabue’s two-part anthology. It was released by Warner Music Italy as a single on CD and as a digital download three weeks before the collection itself, which reached the shops on 30 May 2008. Ligabue wrote both the words and the music. The production was handled by Corrado Rustici, one of the most sought-after Italian producers of the period, who also arranged the track together with the singer, and the recording and mixing were done by David Fraser at The Plant Studios in Sausalito, California. Rustici played guitars and keyboards himself, with Michael Urbano on drums, Sean Hurley on bass and Frank Martin on piano. The result is a pop-rock ballad of a little over four minutes that opens quietly and builds towards a wide, anthemic chorus.

By 2008 Ligabue had been a household name in Italy for almost twenty years. Born in Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia, on 13 March 1960, he had started out in 1987 with an amateur band called Orazero and released his first album, simply titled «Ligabue», in 1990. Songs such as «Balliamo sul mondo», «Ho perso le parole» and above all «Certe notti» turned him into the standard-bearer of Italian rock; «Certe notti» was later voted the Italian song of the 1990s in a magazine poll. He is also a film-maker: his directorial debut «Radiofreccia» won three David di Donatello awards in 1999 and earned him a Nastro d’Argento as best new director, and he went on to direct «Da zero a dieci» and «Made in Italy». In September 2005 he gathered an audience of around 180,000 people in Reggio Emilia, a European record for a single paying artist at the time.

The lyric of «Il centro del mondo» is built almost entirely out of requests. The singer keeps asking the person he loves to take him somewhere — anywhere at all, from a distant continent to the nearest bar, from the sea to a planet — and to show him what it really means to set off, to travel light, to travel with his heart rather than with his luggage. Ligabue himself explained the idea in an interview with the weekly «Sorrisi e Canzoni»: the effects of love, he said, are enormously powerful, and when you allow yourself to give in to it you become more relaxed and your relationship with the world becomes more open and less confrontational, so that you end up feeling, quite naturally, at the centre of the world. The title is therefore not a boast but a description of a state of mind, and the chorus turns it around: it is the other person who is the centre of the world, the first flare fired into the sky when the singer loses his bearings, the one who takes his time, his space and the best of him.

Did you know?

The song was one of three previously unreleased tracks added to «Secondo tempo». The other two were «Il mio pensiero», which went to radio on 5 September 2008, and «Ho ancora la forza», a song Ligabue had written with Francesco Guccini for Guccini’s album «Stagioni» and which was reissued here with modified words.

«Secondo tempo» was designed as the closing half of a pair. «Primo tempo» had appeared in 2007 and covered the first part of Ligabue’s career; the second volume gathered the singles that followed, with eighteen tracks on the CD and twenty-one music videos on the accompanying DVD. The football metaphor of the two titles — first half and second half — is deliberate.

The track was recorded a long way from Emilia. David Fraser engineered and mixed it at The Plant Studios in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco, with an American rhythm section: Michael Urbano on drums and Sean Hurley on bass, plus Frank Martin on piano.

The video was filmed in Barcelona rather than in Italy. Directed by Marco Salom with Cosimo Alemà for Angelfilm, it follows two actors, Stanislav Jakuschevski and Misia Navarro, through a busy street where the couple’s meeting appears to suspend the ordinary rules of time and place.

The single reached the top of the Italian airplay chart, which for a track that was not attached to a new studio album is a notable result; it was also the piece that carried the whole anthology onto the radio in the weeks before the collection came out.

2008 was a very busy year for Ligabue on stage. After a European tour he played the «ElleElle Stadi» dates during the summer and then closed the year with seven nights at the Arena di Verona on 25, 27, 28 and 30 September and 1, 3 and 4 October, accompanied by the seventy-strong Arena orchestra conducted by Marco Sabiu. The recordings became the live album and DVD «Sette notti in Arena», released on 5 June 2009.

For learners the title itself is a grammar exercise: «il centro del mondo» shows the articulated preposition «del», which is simply «di» plus «il» written as one word. Italian does this with «a», «da», «di», «in» and «su», and the song uses several of these contractions in the space of a single chorus.