Volare (Nel blu dipinto di blu)
Domenico Modugno
A card about one tense, and it is the tense Italian learners find hardest to place: the imperfetto. dipingevo, volavo, spariva, suonava, venivo, incominciavo a volare — six of them, every one describing a state or a repeated action rather than a finished event. Textbooks teach the endings in a table and students still reach for the passato prossimo instead. Hearing six in a row, all doing the same job, fixes the feel of it far better than the table does. The nouns are the plainest Italian available: cielo, sole, stelle, vento, mani, occhi. A 1958 recording, so the diction is slow and unusually clear, which makes B1+ generous rather than harsh.
How to study this song
The card for “Volare (Nel blu dipinto di blu)” is built from 55 study entries at B1+: 28 Italian words, 9 adjectives and 18 verb forms. Work through the glossary first: alba, cielo and faccia are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 18 distinct forms against 9 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| alba | dawn | amanecer | aube | amanhecer | dageraad | Morgendämmerung |
| cielo | sky | cielo | ciel | céu | hemel | Himmel |
| faccia | face | cara | visage | rosto | gezicht | Gesicht |
| mani | hands | manos | mains | mãos |
What this song teaches you
Level · B1+
- Vocabulary words
- 28
- Adjectives
- 9
- Word combos
- 10
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 18
- Quiz questions
- 35
More Italian songs at this level
Background
About the song
“Nel blu dipinto di blu”, universally known as “Volare”, is the song that changed the course of Italian popular music.
Written by Domenico Modugno with Franco Migliacci and first performed by Modugno in 1958, it broke with the sentimental crooning of the day: instead of a static love ballad, it opened its arms wide and imagined flying up into an endless blue sky, sung with a soaring, almost operatic release on the word “volare” (to fly).
Its sense of freedom and joy made it an instant symbol of a modern, optimistic post-war Italy. Modugno wrote it with Franco Migliacci, who came up with the idea while looking at Marc Chagall paintings — a man who paints himself blue and takes off into the sky.
Did you know?
The song won the Sanremo Festival in 1958 and then represented Italy at that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, where it finished third — yet it went on to eclipse every song that beat it.
At the first-ever Grammy Awards in 1959 it won both Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and it remains the only foreign-language recording ever to take those two top prizes. It has since been covered by hundreds of artists in many languages.
Charts & streaming
Released under the title “Volare” abroad, the record topped the US Billboard charts and sold in the millions worldwide, an almost unheard-of feat for an Italian-language song. Decades on it is still one of the most recorded and most recognised Italian songs of all time, a permanent standard of the global songbook.
It spent five non-consecutive weeks at number one in the United States in 1958, sold around two million copies there that year and was Billboard’s song of the year.