Al Bano & Romina Power – Felicità

Italy’s Song Of Happiness Finished Second, And One Of Its Singers Never Wanted To Record It

Romina Power told podcast host Alessandro Cattelan in January 2026 that she never wanted to record Felicità at all. She found the song banal, she said, and the music she made with Al Bano in the 1980s was not the kind she listened to herself. It was a startling thing to hear about a record that had been the couple’s calling card for 44 years, a duet built on two people looking pleased to be standing next to each other. It also explains the record. One singer treats the song as an aria and the other treats it as conversation, and the second voice was never pretending.

Keep watching: Al Bano & Romina Power – Ci Sarà · Al Bano & Romina Power – Liberta!

Her distance from the material makes more sense against where she came from. Power was born in Los Angeles on October 2, 1951, the daughter of Hollywood star Tyrone Power and actress Linda Christian. After her parents divorced she grew up between Mexico, boarding schools in England, Switzerland and Italy, and her mother’s home in Rome, and she had been working in Italian films since 1965. In 1967 she was cast in Nel sole, a movie built around a song by a young tenor from Puglia named Albano Carrisi. They married on July 26, 1970, in his hometown of Cellino San Marco and cut their first duet the same year. By 1976 they were representing Italy at Eurovision, where they finished seventh.

A famous marriage was not the same thing as a hit, and for a decade the couple had the first without the second. The song that changed it came from three writers: lyricist Cristiano Minellono and composers Dario Farina and Gino De Stefani, with Farina producing for Baby Records. Minellono’s lyric defines happiness as a list of small, ordinary things, and nearly every line opens on the title word. The two voices trade those lines back and forth, his at full operatic stretch, hers light and almost spoken. That plainness is what Power heard as banal. After the podcast aired she clarified on Instagram that she had meant everyday, not worthless.

Second place, first in the shops

Everyday turned out to be what Italy wanted. The couple took the song to the Sanremo Music Festival at the Teatro Ariston, held January 28 to 30, 1982, in a field of 30 entries. The jury gave first place to Riccardo Fogli’s Storie di tutti i giorni and second to Felicità, with Drupi third. Losing cost them nothing. The Italian hit parade ranked the single No.1, and Rolling Stone Italia’s tally of the year’s sales places it twelfth among Italy’s best-selling singles of 1982. The Swiss chart took it to No.3, Spain to No.4 and West Germany to No.6, where the BVMI certified it gold. Belgium and Austria logged top-ten peaks as well.

The performance on this page belongs to that climb. The duo’s official channel labels it Tombola radiotelevisiva, dated March 27, 1982, eight weeks after the festival. By then the song had stopped being a Sanremo runner-up and was on its way out of Italy.

The song outlasted the marriage

What the record did next was fix the couple’s public image for good. They won Sanremo in 1984 with Ci sarà, another Minellono lyric, returned to Eurovision in 1985 and became fixtures in German-speaking Europe. The image proved more durable than the marriage behind it. Al Bano and Power separated in 1999 and divorced in 2012. A year later they were back on a stage together in Moscow, and in 2015 they walked out at the Ariston again and sang the song that had lost there.

The reunion did not settle who the song belongs to. In June 2025 Al Bano sang it at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Power posted that she dissociated herself from the performance, calling it neither the place nor the moment for that song. Seven months later came the podcast. Minellono answered that she was spitting in the plate she had eaten from. Both of them have a point. The song made her famous, and she is entitled to say she never liked it. Her reluctance is also the reason the record holds up. A hymn to contentment sung by a tenor at full sail needs someone beside him who sounds like an ordinary afternoon, and the lyric she called banal had banality as its subject.