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EUROVISION SONG CONTEST

Eurovision in Italy: Six things to expect from the 2022 contest

As Italy prepares to host the Grand Final of Eurovision 2022 this weekend, here's our quick guide to making sense of it all.

Eurovision in Italy: Six things to expect from the 2022 contest
Italy's Eurovision contenders Mahmood & BLANCO arrive for the opening ceremony on May 8th, 2022 at the Palalpitour in Turin. Photo by Marco BERTORELLO / AFP

The northern Italian city of Turin is hosting the glitzy event in 2022 thanks to the leather-clad, eyeliner-wearing Italian rock band Måneskin, who claimed the title in Rotterdam last year with their track ‘Zitti e Buoni’.

As the acts move through the semi-final stages this week before the Grand Final on Saturday, here’s what you can expect from the 66th edition of Eurovision. Get your score cards, flags and sequins at the ready.

High expectations for Italy’s entry

After last year’s win, Italy’s act for 2022, Mahmood and BLANCO, have a lot to live up to. Not just because of the country’s Eurovision victory, and not even because Italy has been on a winning streak – but because the duo have their own hype to follow.

The young musicians shot to prominence after winning this year’s Sanremo Music Festival in Italy in February with their hit, ‘Brividi‘ (Chills).

That’s the track they’ll be playing at Eurovision and hoping it’s enough to convince the international judges and audience to award them votes of douze points.

In rehearsals, they seemed to be performing below par, but then brought back their A-game ahead of Saturday’s final.

Individually, they boast their own successes too. Mahmood broke into the spotlight on X Factor Italia, as did the reigning champions Måneskin. He’s got a stream of singles and two albums under his belt and has already experienced Eurovision accolade, coming second in 2019 with his hit ‘Soldi‘.

BLANCO is a singer/rapper from the northern Italian city, Brescia, with chart-toppers in the form of a single and an album.

You can listen to the track here, with the lyrics in Italian and English translation underneath.

Italy doesn’t have to compete to get into the final

Italy can participate in the final without needing to qualify, as it is one of the five countries that have a right to enter, along with Spain, Germany, France and the UK.

The other countries must first compete in the semi-finals, which begin on Tuesday, May 10th and the second lot are due to compete on Thursday, May 12th.

This year’s theme

As you may expect, Italy is injecting a certain artistic (higher brow?) flair into this year’s theme.

The organiser, Italian public broadcaster Rai, described the theme in Turin as “a visual representation of The Sound of Beauty”.

“In order to represent sound and its visual properties, the design is based on the symmetrical structure and patterns of cymatics – the study of sound wave phenomena,” it added.

Expect lots of beautiful, symmetrical sound waves, akin to the shape of looping Italian gardens.

Initial snaps from rehearsals show the event promises to have the expected fireworks and pomp too, even so.

Hats off to Italy for exerting some cultural influence, but this is Eurovision, after all. It’s an unspoken law that feathers, sparkles, tassels and questionable taste are a founding principle of the event – and this year will surely be no different.

You can join in by voting

Once upon a time, voting at home was almost a parlour game played among family and friends with pencils and notebooks.

Then it evolved into televoting, sending texts, and now for 2022, you can play a part in choosing the winning act by voting through Eurovision’s Official Eurovision Song Contest app.

Details of how and when to vote will be shared during the shows.

This would be Italy’s fourth Eurovision win

Should the rapping duo give everyone the chills as they hope to and they bag the title, it would mark the fourth time Italy has won Eurovision.

The country previously won the contest in 1964 with Non Ho L’età, receiving nearly three times as many votes as the runner-up, then in 1990, when Toto Cutugno won with the song Insieme:1992 and last year with Måneskin’s triumph.

Italy’s Maneskin performs during the final of the 65th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest 2021, at the Ahoy convention centre in Rotterdam, on May 22, 2021. (Photo by KENZO TRIBOUILLARD / AFP)

Italy is one of the 14 founding participants of the Eurovision Song Contest – it could even be one of the reasons the world tunes in to watch the sometimes controversial, often hilarious music competition, as it’s said to be modelled on Italy’s Sanremo music festival.

You can watch on TV or online

If you’re in Italy, you can catch the spectacle on host broadcaster’s network Rai or get tickets at the PalaOlimpico venue in Turin, Piedmont.

For a full list of which channel to tune into for your country, or for online streaming, check here.

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CULTURE

Migrant boats make music at Milan’s La Scala

String instruments made from migrant boats met with sustained applause as they debuted at Italy's prestigious La Scala opera house in tribute to those who perish attempting the Mediterranean crossing to Europe.

Migrant boats make music at Milan's La Scala

The multicoloured “violins of the sea” were made by prisoners out of rickety boats washed up on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, a first port for many seeking to cross from North Africa.

The debut of the “Orchestra of the Sea” with the instruments, formed especially for the occasion, visibly moved the audience.

Two of the violin makers – inmates from the high security Opera prison near Milan – watched Monday’s performance of Bach and Vivaldi from the theatre’s royal box, usually reserved for state dignitaries.

“To be invited to La Scala for something we created is magic” said 42-year-old Claudio, one of the prison’s four apprentice luthiers who is serving a life sentence for two murders.

Cracked and diesel-soaked wood from the migrants’ boats, destined for the scrapyard, was transformed into the violins, violas and cellos.

An inmate collects wood on a migrant boat to make music instruments as part of the project ‘Violins of the sea’ at Opera’s prison, near Milan, on February 8, 2024. Photo by Marco Bertorello / AFP.

‘Giving waste a voice’

“We give voice to everything that is usually thrown away: the wood from boats that is shredded, the migrants who flee war and poverty and are treated like trash, and the prisoners who are not given a second chance,” says Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori, who came up with the idea.

Mosca Mondadori, president of the House of the Spirits and the Arts foundation, hopes the string instruments can be played in other concert halls in Europe, “to touch people’s souls in the face of poverty”.

READ ALSO: Italy’s Lampedusa struggles as migrant arrivals double the population

The central Mediterranean is the deadliest migratory route in the world. Nearly 2,498 people died or disappeared along it last year, some 75 percent more than in 2022.

In a courtyard at the Opera prison, dilapidated boats are strewn across the grass among broken planks of wood.

A pink and white baby shoe, a baby bottle, nappies and a tiny green T-shirt are among items recovered from their holds.

Discarded clothing stiff with salt, rusting cans of sardines, and rudimentary life jackets evoke perilous journeys at the mercy of rough seas. “You can smell the sea here,” within the grey concrete walls of the courtyard, 49-year-old prisoner Andrea said.

“It is very strong and transports you very far. It is present even in the instruments, though less so,” he says as he dismantles boats and searches for suitable wood to make the instruments.

The entrance of the lutherie of the House of the Spirits and the Arts foundation. Photo by Marco Bertorello / AFP.

‘Alive and useful’

Andrea, who is serving a life term for murder, sees the time he spends in the wood workshop as a form of “redemption”.

“Time does not pass in prison. But there, we feel alive and useful,” he said.

In the small dark room with barred windows, Nicolae, a 41-year-old Romanian behind bars since 2013, is busy sawing a piece of wood.

He takes measurements, before carefully carving a violin’s soundboard.

READ ALSO: EXPLAINED: What’s behind Italy’s soaring number of migrant arrivals?

“By building violins… I feel reborn,” he said.

Paring tools, penknives, chisels, saws and small wood planes are lined up on a wall panel, potential weapons which are scrupulously checked back in at the end of the day by the guards.

Standing in front of his workbench, master luthier Enrico Allorto says that he used a method from the 16th century when bending the wood, in order to keep the boat varnish intact.

There is no Stradivarius here. These violins have “a more muted timbre, but they have their charm and reproduce the entire range of sounds”, he says.

“They arouse emotions in the musicians, who in turn transmit them to the public”.

By AFP’s Brigitte HAGEMANN

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