Al Bano & Romina Power – Ci Sarà

More than two million Italians mailed in a postcard to vote for it — and Al Bano and Romina Power won the country’s biggest song festival with a ballad written by the same team behind their signature hit.

By 1984, Al Bano and Romina Power had already given Italy one of its most beloved songs in Felicità. What they hadn’t done was win the Sanremo Festival — the country’s most prestigious music competition, which they had entered in 1982 with Felicità only to finish second. Two years later they returned with Ci Sarà, and this time they took the crown, carried to victory by more than two million handwritten postcards from the Italian public.

Keep watching: Al Bano & Romina Power – Felicità · Al Bano & Romina Power – Libertà!

The song came from a proven partnership. Ci Sarà was written by lyricist Cristiano Minellono and composer Dario Farina — the very same team that had penned Felicità — with Michael Hofmann also credited on the music. Minellono and Farina understood exactly how to write for the duo: a warm, uplifting melody built to carry Al Bano’s operatic tenor and Romina’s softer voice in the intertwining harmony that was their signature. The title translates as “There will be,” and the lyric is one of gentle reassurance and hope — a promise that something better lies ahead — the kind of open-hearted optimism that had become the couple’s trademark.

Winning Sanremo by the postcard

The 1984 Sanremo victory came through a voting system that now feels wonderfully of its era. Rather than phone lines or apps, the festival tallied votes submitted on Totip postcards — the coupons attached to Italy’s popular football-pools betting slips — which viewers filled out and mailed in. Ci Sarà drew an extraordinary 2,122,616 of them, a landslide that made Al Bano and Romina Power the champions of the thirty-fourth Sanremo Festival. That same 1984 edition, incidentally, marked the arrival of a young newcomer named Eros Ramazzotti, who won the festival’s youth section — a passing of one generation’s torch even as the established stars claimed the main prize.

The win mattered because Sanremo was, and remains, the launchpad for Italian pop. A victory there guaranteed nationwide saturation and a springboard into the rest of Europe and Latin America, markets where the duo were already enormous. Ci Sarà was released as a single paired with Quando un amore se ne va and drawn from their 1984 album Effetto amore on Baby Records. It reached No. 1 in Italy and climbed the charts across the Continent, and the couple recorded it in Spanish, as they did with most of their material, to reach their vast audience in Spain and Latin America.

Second only to Felicità

In the end, Ci Sarà became the duo’s second most widely known song in the world, trailing only Felicità itself — a remarkable achievement for a pair who had dozens of hits across their catalog. It slotted perfectly into a body of work built on melody, warmth, and the real-life romance of its two singers: Albano Carrisi, the baker’s son from Puglia with the operatic voice, and Romina Power, the Los Angeles-born daughter of Hollywood star Tyrone Power, who had met on a film set in 1967 and turned their marriage into one of Europe’s great musical partnerships.

The song has outlived even that partnership. Al Bano and Romina divorced in the years that followed, but reunited professionally in 2013, and Ci Sarà remains a fixture of their reunion concerts, sung back to them by audiences from Italy to Russia to South America. Its message of reassurance — that there will be something, someone, some better tomorrow — has proven as durable as the melody carrying it. Four decades and millions of postcards later, the promise still lands.