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A2

Ancora

Eduardo De Crescenzo

Language
Italian
Released
1981
Genre
pop
Level
A2
Difficulty score
589
Duration
3:23

What does «Ancora» mean?

«Ancora» means "still" or "again". Awake in the middle of the night, the narrator cannot stop thinking about a woman who is gone: he still wants her and has not moved on.

How to study this song

Learning “Ancora” means 53 entries at A2 — 15 Italian words, 8 adjectives and 30 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Work through the glossary first: notte, chiodo and casino are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 30 distinct forms against 8 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

ITENESFRPTNLDE
nottenightnochenuitnoitenachtNacht
chiodonailclavocloupregospijkerNagel
casinomess, fusslío, follónpagaille, bazarconfusão, barulhobende, toestandChaos, Rummel

This card holds 12 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

What this song teaches you

Level · A2

Vocabulary words
15
Adjectives
8
Word combos
8
Expressions
12
Verb forms
30
Quiz questions
35

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  • Le donne lo sanno — Ligabue (2005)A2+
  • Se t'innamori muori — Noemi (2025)A2

Background

About the song

«Ancora» was released in February 1981 as a 45 rpm single on Dischi Ricordi, with «Il treno» on the B-side, and it is the song that turned Eduardo De Crescenzo from a respected musician into a household name in Italy. Both sides were written by the same team: the lyrics are by Franco Migliacci, one of the great lyricists of Italian popular music and co-author of «Nel blu, dipinto di blu», and the music is by the composer Claudio Mattone. Within weeks of its release it was in the Italian top five, and more than forty years later it is still one of the most recognisable ballads of the period.

De Crescenzo was born in Naples on 8 February 1951 and was, in the most literal sense, a child of music. He was given his first accordion at the age of three and made his stage debut at the Teatro Argentina in Rome when he was only five. He went on to study classical music, and in the late 1960s he played in a beat group, as so many young Italian musicians did at the time. By the end of the 1970s he was known in the business as an excellent accordionist and singer, but he had never had a hit of his own. «Ancora» changed that almost overnight.

The turning point was the thirty-first Festival di Sanremo, held from 5 to 7 February 1981 and presented by Claudio Cecchetto together with Eleonora Vallone. Twenty-eight songs were in competition, and the festival was won by Alice with «Per Elisa», ahead of Loretta Goggi with «Maledetta primavera». «Ancora» came through the preliminary rounds and reached the final, but it did not finish among the top ten in the public vote. What made the difference was a separate jury of quality, presided over by the film director Sergio Leone and including actors such as Alberto Sordi, Ugo Tognazzi, Giancarlo Giannini and Eleonora Giorgi. That jury gave De Crescenzo its award for the best performance of the festival. The idea proved so successful that from the following year Sanremo made it permanent, as the Critics’ Prize that still exists today.

The song is a love ballad sung by a man who cannot sleep. It is the middle of the night and he lies awake, unable to stop thinking about a woman who is no longer with him. He looks back on how much trouble he went through to win her, on a love that had not had time to ripen, and on the cruel timing of losing her just when he had come to love her properly. In the chorus a single word, repeated three times, carries the whole weight of the song: he still wants her, he is still stuck, and nothing has moved on since the evening they parted. He insists that no one else, not even an angel, could make him feel the way she did.

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ITENESFRPTNLDE
altahigh, latealta, avanzadahaute, avancéealta, avançadahoog, diephoch, tief
sveglioawakedespiertoéveilléacordadowakkerwach

This card holds 6 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

ITENESFRPTNLDE
sonoI amestoy, soyje suisestou, souik benich bin
seiyou areeres, estástu esés, estásjij bentdu bist
ci stavo meglioI was better offestaba mejorj'étais mieuxestava melhorik was beter afmir ging es dort besser
stavoI wasestabaj'étaisestavaik wasich war
pensoI thinkpiensoje pensepensoik denkich denke
ti voglioI want youte quiero, te deseoje te veuxquero-teik wil jouich will dich
voglioI wantquieroje veuxqueroik wilich will

This card holds 23 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

The second verse becomes more restless and almost comic in its desperation. He gets dressed and undressed again without knowing why, feels a longing that will not let him rest, and imagines doing something foolish sooner or later: going to her house in the middle of the night, throwing pebbles at her lit window and kicking at the door that stays closed to him. It is the portrait of a man who knows exactly how ridiculous he would look and who is not sure he can stop himself anyway.

Much of the song’s power lies in De Crescenzo’s voice, which is often described as husky and slightly rough, capable of moving from an almost spoken murmur in the verses to a wide, straining cry in the chorus. Mattone’s melody climbs step by step towards that repeated word, and the arrangement leaves plenty of room for the voice. After Sanremo the song gave its title to De Crescenzo’s debut album, released the same year on Dischi Ricordi.

For learners of Italian, «Ancora» is a compact lesson in the language of feelings. It shows the difference between «volere» on its own and the fixed expression «voler bene», which is how Italians say they love someone with affection. It contains a hypothetical built on an imperfect subjunctive followed by a present conditional, the pairing that expresses «even if this happened, I would say that». It uses reflexive verbs of daily routine, a verb in the simple future, the preposition «da» to say «since» a moment in time, and several everyday idioms: a fixed idea that you cannot shake off, the phrase for «sooner or later», the expressions for acting crazy and for kicking something, and a very informal way of saying that you do not care at all. Those colloquial touches are mild, but they are exactly the kind of Italian that textbooks tend to leave out and that native speakers use every day.

Did you know?

The award that De Crescenzo won at Sanremo in 1981 is usually remembered as the first Critics’ Prize of the festival. That year the jury of quality was an experiment, chaired by Sergio Leone, the director of «The Good, the Bad and the Ugly» and «Once Upon a Time in America», and made up largely of film people. Its verdict on «Ancora» was so widely shared that from 1982 the festival turned the idea into a permanent award, which later took the name of Mia Martini.

The song did not need to win the festival to become a hit. «Ancora» climbed to number five in the Italian singles chart in March 1981, only a few weeks after Sanremo, and many Italians today remember it far better than several of the songs that finished above it in the official ranking.

Mina, the most admired female voice of Italian pop, recorded her own version of «Ancora» on her 1986 album «Sì, buana», and included it again in 1998 on «Mina Sanremo», a collection devoted to songs from the festival. Over the years it has also been sung by Ornella Vanoni and Anna Oxa, and in 2015 the pop-opera trio Il Volo performed it at Sanremo, bringing it to a new generation.

The melody has travelled beyond Italy too. There are versions by the French singer Mireille Mathieu, by the Dutch singer André Hazes and by the French singer Hélène Ségara, each adapted to its own language and audience.

The song has a place in Italian popular culture well beyond the record shops. In the 1983 Christmas comedy «Vacanze di Natale», one of the most quoted Italian films of the decade, Jerry Calà’s character alludes to it, and the song was used as the theme of the late-night television programmes of the journalist Gigi Marzullo, above all «Sottovoce», so that for many viewers it is still associated with the small hours of Italian television — rather fitting for a song about a man who cannot sleep.

De Crescenzo returned to Sanremo four more times after his debut, in 1985, 1987, 1989 and 1991. His 1991 entry, «E la musica va», was later recorded in English as «The Beat Goes On» by Phil Manzanera, the guitarist of Roxy Music. Throughout his career he has kept the accordion at the centre of his music, often playing it on stage alongside his singing.

A curious link runs through the credits: Franco Migliacci, who wrote these words about a love that makes you feel you are flying, had co-written more than twenty years earlier «Nel blu, dipinto di blu», the song the whole world knows as «Volare».

Charts & streaming

Released in February 1981, the single «Ancora» reached number five in the Italian singles chart in March of that year and finished 1981 as the forty-second best-selling single in Italy. It was awarded a gold disc in Italy.

Its success at Sanremo and on the radio led directly to De Crescenzo’s debut album, also called «Ancora», released in 1981 on Dischi Ricordi. The record runs for about thirty-five minutes across ten tracks, all with lyrics by Franco Migliacci and music by Claudio Mattone, one of them co-written with Piero Pintucci, and it was recorded at the Quattro 1 studios in Rome. The title song sits in the middle of the album, as the sixth track.

Four decades on, «Ancora» remains the signature song of Eduardo De Crescenzo and one of the evergreens of Italian light music: it is regularly revived on television and at music events, and it has been recorded by artists as different as Mina, Il Volo and Mireille Mathieu.