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ITALY AT THE EUROVISION: OXA / LEALI - AVREI VOLUTO (1989)


Italy took its well deserved third victory - finally! - at the Eurovision song contest 2021. Over the years several other Italian entries would have been worthy winners. In this series I will go through all of them from the worst ranking to the winners.

Fausto Leali (77) and Anna Oxa (60) joined forces for Sanremo 1989 and I recall them stating somewhere they did it so they could go to Eurovision. Or at least Anna did. And indeed they won with Ti lascerò. For Eurovision they instead brought re-write of that titled Avrei voluto. After a very slow start at the voting they finished rather disappointing 9th out of 22.
Fausto Leali has been around since 1960 in the music business first in various bands and then solo. Big success came in 1967 and has lasted with ups and downs until these days as he's still around, for example in Big Brother VIP 2020 where he's disqualified for using the N word......
Thirteen Sanremos to his credit, with eight of them with a Top-5 finish between 1968 and 2009, 19 studio albums and 58 singles his raspy voice is familiar to every Italian.
Anna Oxa, born in Albania, shot to the fame in Sanremo when she was only 17 with her aggressive punk look and an evergreen song Un'emozione da poco finishing second. She becomes soon one of the icons and delivered hits in regular pace. She wins Sanremo again in 1999, and is runner up also in 1997. She's done a total of 14 festivals between 1978-2011. In 2013 she took part in Dancing with Stars but had to retire after an injury, that apparently has caused troubles with Rai and some say she's persona non grata in Rai now. Who knows? In anyways in recent years she's been considered a bit cuckoo and lost in her spiritual and artistic search and not understood. One day maybe we will find truth of all these things people say about her.... Her back catalogue is still packing fantastic tracks in her 17 studio albums and 39 singles.







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