Ricchi e Poveri – Come Vorrei

For a stretch of the early 1980s, millions of Italians heard the same three voices every week — the sound that told them the show was over and the night was ending.

Every week, as Enzo Tortora signed off Italy’s hugely popular RAI variety show Portobello, the same tender melody carried the audience out. It was “Come vorrei” by Ricchi e Poveri — three voices braided together over a slow, aching arrangement, a song of longing chosen to close one of the most-watched programs on Italian television. For a generation of viewers it became inseparable from Saturday night itself, the sound of the evening winding down.

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Released in 1981 on Baby Records, “Come vorrei” was written by Cristiano Minellono and Dario Farina, the songwriting team behind most of the group’s biggest records. It came from the album …E penso a te, the first the Genoa group made as a trio — Angela Brambati, Angelo Sotgiu, and Franco Gatti — after Marina Occhiena left in 1981 following a sharp falling-out within the group. That change reshaped their sound. Where Ricchi e Poveri had once built dense four-part harmonies in the manner of the American vocal groups they admired, the trio leaned into three voices moving closer to unison, warmer and more direct, and “Come vorrei” is that new approach at its most affecting.

It arrived in an extraordinary year for the group. The same album had already produced “Sarà perché ti amo,” the international smash that became the best-selling Italian single of 1981 and carried the trio across Europe and beyond. “Come vorrei” was the third of the album’s four singles, and rather than chase the earlier hit’s dance energy it went the other direction entirely — a straight, unhurried love song. Issued as a double A-side with “Stasera canto,” it settled into the Italian top ten and stayed there for roughly five months. A Spanish-language version, “Dónde estarás,” carried it into Spain and across Latin America, where the group had a devoted following.

The sound of Saturday night

What fixed the song permanently in Italian memory was television. When it became the closing theme of Portobello — Tortora’s phenomenon of a show, where viewers phoned in and a live parrot was the improbable mascot — “Come vorrei” reached an audience far beyond record buyers, playing week after week to millions. The group would repeat the trick the next year with “Piccolo amore,” another Portobello sign-off. The performance here comes from the Italian program Musicalmente in 1981, the trio delivering the song at the height of the era that made them one of Italy’s most successful pop exports. Ricchi e Poveri have kept going across the decades since, through lineups and losses, but the intertwined voices on this recording capture the exact moment three singers from Genoa became the sound of a country’s living rooms.