Nessuno
Mina
How to study this song
The card for “Nessuno” is built from 21 study entries at A1+: 9 Italian words, 2 adjectives and 10 verb forms. Begin with destino, amore and cielo: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 10 distinct forms against 2 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| destino | fate, destiny | destino | destin | destino | lot | Schicksal |
| amore | love | amor | amour | amor | liefde | Liebe |
| cielo | sky, heaven | cielo | ciel | céu | hemel | Himmel |
| dono | gift | regalo, don | don, cadeau | dom, presente |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 9
- Adjectives
- 2
- Word combos
- 7
- Expressions
- 5
- Verb forms
- 10
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Nessuno» ("Nobody") is an Italian song from 1959 that became one of the first great hits of Mina, the singer who would go on to dominate Italian popular music for decades. The song was not written for her. According to the Italian Wikipedia, the lyrics are by Antonietta De Simone and the music by Edilio Capotosti and Vittorio Mascheroni; the English Wikipedia credits De Simone and Capotosti. It was presented at the ninth Sanremo Festival in 1959, where, as the rules of the time required, it was sung twice by two different artists, Wilma De Angelis and Betty Curtis. It finished eighth. That year the festival was won by «Piove (Ciao ciao bambina)», sung by Domenico Modugno and Johnny Dorelli.
The two festival versions were elegant and melodic, in the style that Sanremo audiences expected. Betty Curtis recorded the song for the CGD label and Wilma De Angelis for Philips, and later in 1959 the veteran Nilla Pizzi also recorded it with the orchestra of Marcello De Martino. The Italian Wikipedia describes the success of those melodic recordings as modest, and the English Wikipedia says the public largely ignored them. The story of «Nessuno» would probably have ended there if a nineteen-year-old singer from Cremona had not decided to turn it upside down.
Mina recorded the song for Italdisc, the label of the producer Davide Matalon, and transformed it completely. Her version is fast, loud and syncopated: she sings at full volume, stretches and breaks the phrases and moves away from the original melody, so that a sentimental ballad becomes a piece of Italian rock and roll. The Italian Wikipedia calls it a swing version that changes the tempo of the song. Singers of this new, energetic style were nicknamed «urlatori», the "shouters", and Mina soon became the best known of them. According to the English Wikipedia, she first presented her «Nessuno» at a rock and roll festival held at the Ice Palace in Milan, and the single was a large commercial success: it is the recording that everyone remembers today.
The lyric is a short and very direct vow of love. The singer swears that no one, not even destiny, will ever be able to separate her from the person she loves, because their love is a gift from heaven and will last forever. She says that only with him does she feel a joy without limits, that he is at the same time her past and her future, and that her whole world begins and ends with him. In the last part she imagines this love lit up by eternity. There is no story, no quarrel and no rival: the whole song is one promise, repeated with growing intensity, and the title word «nessuno» returns again and again like a drumbeat.