Non ti scordar mai di me

About the song

«Non ti scordar mai di me» is the song that turned Giusy Ferreri from a television contestant into one of the best-known voices in Italy almost overnight. It was heard for the first time on 27 May 2008, during the final of the first Italian edition of X Factor, and it was released as a single three days later, on 30 May 2008, by Sony BMG and Ricordi. Ferreri, born in Palermo in 1979, had competed in the over-25 category and finished second in the show. Before the programme she had spent years singing with small bands and working as a cashier in a supermarket, and that ordinary background became part of the story the Italian press told about her that summer.

The song was written for her by Roberto Casalino, who wrote the lyrics, and Tiziano Ferro, who composed the music together with Casalino. Ferro was already one of the most successful Italian singers of his generation, and his involvement gave the new artist a strong start. A month after the single, on 27 June 2008, the song became the title track of a debut EP, and in November of the same year it was included on her first full album, «Gaetana», which takes its name from her own second name. The Italian edition of the album also carried a Spanish version of the song, «Nunca te olvides de mí», which was released in Spain at the end of December 2008.

The song is a ballad about a love that has ended, sung by someone who is not angry but wistful. It opens with a wish in the conditional: if the other person were still there that evening, everything would be better, even the moon, which now looks smaller than ever. Then comes the fear that time will erase the last traces of the relationship. The chorus is a request repeated again and again: never forget me, remember even my little habits, because what we had was real and not a minor detail. The singer calls the story the most enchanting fairy tale she has ever written, one whose happy ending seemed certain. In the second verse she admits that part of the blame may be hers, for believing it would last forever, and she observes that things can wear out and disappear without warning.

For learners of Italian the song is especially useful because of its title. «Non ti scordar» is a NEGATIVE IMPERATIVE addressed to one person, and in Italian that form is built in a way that surprises most learners: «non» plus the infinitive, not a conjugated verb. Here the infinitive «scordarsi», to forget, also appears in its shortened poetic form, without the final vowel, with the reflexive pronoun placed in front. The rest of the song is a small tour of other moods and tenses: an imperfect subjunctive in a hypothetical clause, three present conditionals, two simple futures, a past subjunctive after a superlative, a passato prossimo with «essere», and the pronominal construction that means to go away. There is also the everyday expression «fare a meno di», to do without, and the adverb «in fondo», meaning after all or deep down.