← All songs
A2-

Il centro del mondo

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

ITENESFRPTNLDE
centrocentrecentrocentrecentrocentrumZentrum
mondoworldmundomondemundowereldWelt
tempotimetiempotempstempotijdZeit
cuoreheartcorazóncœurcoração

What this song teaches you

Level · A2-

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

More Italian songs at this level

  • Tu cosa fai questa sera — Noemi, Vito Salamanca (2026)A2
  • Piove in discoteca — Tommaso Paradiso (2022)A2-
  • Balorda nostalgia — Olly & Juli (2025)A2+
  • Ancora qui — Elisa (2012)A2+

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.

Verbomatico
Learn:English·Spanish·Italian·Dutch·French·Portuguese·German
Home·Songs·Guides·Pricing·About·Contact·Install the app·Terms·Privacy·Refunds
Legal notice··

© 2026 Verbomatico

hart
Herz
cieloskycielocielcéuhemelHimmel
bengalaflare, Bengal lightbengalafusée éclairantefoguete luminosolichtkogelLeuchtfackel, bengalisches Licht
spaziospaceespacioespaceespaçoruimteRaum

This card holds 11 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

ITENESFRPTNLDE
primofirstprimeropremierprimeiroeersteerster
potentepowerfulpotentepuissantpotentekrachtigmächtig

This card holds 5 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

ITENESFRPTNLDE
portamitake mellévameemmène-moileva-meneem me meebring mich
fammilet me, show mehazme, déjamefais-moifaz-melaat melass mich, zeig mir
seiyou areeres, estástu esés, estásjij bentdu bist

This card holds 11 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

For someone learning Italian the song is unusually generous, because almost every line is an order addressed to one person, and Italian orders are where enclitic pronouns live. The affirmative imperative of «tu» takes its pronoun glued onto the end of the verb, so «porta» plus «mi» becomes a single word, and the same happens with «chiedi» plus «mi». With the short imperatives of «fare», «dare», «dire», «stare» and «andare» — «fa’», «da’», «di’», «sta’», «va’» — the attached consonant doubles, which is why «fa’» plus «mi» is written with a double m. A learner who works through this song has met the whole family in one go. Around that core the lyric also offers the impersonal «si» with a third-person verb, a present participle used as a reduced relative clause, the modal verbs «potere» and «dovere» followed by an infinitive, «sapere» plus infinitive meaning to know how to do something, «essere bravo a» plus infinitive meaning to be good at something, and the invariable indefinite «qualsiasi», which never changes ending no matter what noun follows it.

There is also a small but useful lesson in the articulated prepositions. Italian glues certain prepositions to the definite article, and the song uses several of them in quick succession: «in» plus «il», «a» plus «il», «di» plus «il» and the slightly old-fashioned «con» plus «il», which produces a short contracted form that many textbooks now treat as optional. Hearing them all inside one chorus makes the pattern far easier to absorb than a table does. The vocabulary is likewise concrete and easy to picture: sea, sky, heart, space, time, border, venue, flare, modesty, the outward leg and the return leg of a journey. Nothing in it is obscure, which is one reason the song worked so well on the radio.

The video, produced by Angelfilm and directed by Marco Salom together with Cosimo Alemà, was shot in Barcelona and stars Stanislav Jakuschevski and Misia Navarro as a couple whose meeting seems to bend time and place around them; Marco Bassano was the director of photography and Alessio Borgonuovo edited it. It matched the song’s central idea neatly: two people recognise each other and everything else — history, geography, the crowded street around them — momentarily stops mattering.

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.

Charts & streaming

Released on 9 May 2008 by Warner Music Italy, the single went to number one in Italy and finished the year at number thirty-four on the Italian year-end singles chart for 2008. It also topped the Italian airplay chart and was certified platinum in Italy.

«Secondo tempo», the compilation the song was written for, came out on 30 May 2008 and entered the Italian albums chart straight at number one, staying inside the top three for thirteen consecutive weeks. Outside Italy it reached number twenty-six in Switzerland and number twenty-seven on the European albums chart.

The collection was certified multi-platinum in Italy and sold more than 350,000 copies, which made it one of the best-selling albums of the year in the country and, over time, one of the best-selling Italian albums of all time. Sources differ on the exact number of platinum discs awarded, so the safe figure is the sales total rather than the certification level.

The commercial pattern is worth noting: «Secondo tempo» is a greatest-hits package, not a new studio record, yet its lead track behaved like a regular hit single, reaching the top of both the sales chart and the airplay chart in the same season.