GFalling, crying, winning – things ended up going perfectly for 22-year-old Sanremo debutant Angelina Mango at the 74th festival of the Italian hit on Liguria's flower coast. On the home stretch, so to speak, only on the last of the five evenings of the legendary music festival, she overtook the rapper Geolier from Naples, whose song in the Campanian dialect “I p' me, tu p' te” (“I for me, you for you “) was always in the lead. Angelina Mango owed her victory to the vote of television viewers, which was included in the overall ranking on Sunday night with a weight of 34 percent. In the cumulative votes of the press and radio listeners, which were each rated at 33 percent, Geolier was ahead.
The fall on the stage steps, when the singer tripped over her dress and finished her song “La noia” (Boredom) while sitting and with tears in her eyes, may have even helped her. After announcing her win, Mango then shed more tears, this time of thanks. For the first time in ten years, a woman has won Europe's oldest pop and hit festival. On Sunday afternoon, the public broadcaster RAI, which has always broadcast the festival and gathers the nation in front of the television every year, announced that Angelina Mango would also represent Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in May in Malmö, Sweden. The ESC final was a dream that she would never have dared to dream, Mango had shouted to the audience in the Ariston Theater around 2:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, who had duly risen to give an ovation.
Daughter of the musician Pino Mango and the singer Laura Valente
Although the singer herself may have been at the festival in Sanremo for the first time, people have been familiar with the name “Mango” there for a long time. Angelina Mango is the daughter of the musician Pino Mango, who died in 2014 at the age of just 60 – after a heart attack at a concert – and who had his breakthrough in Sanremo in 1985 and who appeared at the festival again and again in the following years. Her mother is the singer Laura Valente, who made her debut with the band “Matia Bazar” in Sanremo in 1992 and was then also one of the regular guests there. As a “figlia d'arte” – which means “daughter of art” rather than “daughter of artists” – the fundamentally likeable Angelina Mango was immediately adopted by the entire nation after her triumph in Sanremo as the reigning favorite daughter of the lighter art of singing.
This year a total of 30 soloists and bands performed in Sanremo – from veterans in the autumn of their careers to established greats and young stars. Hollywood stars such as John Travolta and Russell Crowe were also flown in. The first performed dance numbers from his big movie hits as well as a strange duck dance. The second made fun of the first's dance moves, especially the duck dance. And because politics and current debates always play a role in Sanremo, the cow Ercolina achieved a certain level of fame this year. Protesting farmers had taken the magnificent Simmental cattle from a village in Lombardy for a walk on the waterfront in front of the casino and the Ariston Theater. However, Ercolina's stage appearance that the farmers had hoped for did not happen. Instead, moderator Amadeus, who shaped the festival for the fifth and final time this year as artistic director and master of ceremonies, read out a message from the farmers. Unlike in Germany and France, the farmers' protests in Italy were and are directed primarily against the EU and not against their own government, which in turn has aligned itself with the farmers against Brussels.
This year the cow Ercolina and the existential lawsuit of real farmers, while last year the millionaire influencer Chiara Ferragni led the big woke word, even as co-moderator of Amadeus on one of the five festival evenings. In the meantime, Ferragni has fallen into disgrace because of fraud for alleged charity campaigns, in which she and her husband, the rapper Fedez, in particular, made millions more in profits. Shortly before the start of the festival, the beverage company Coca-Cola withdrew an already produced video with Ferragni, which should have been shown during commercial breaks during broadcasts.
As a crowd puller, Sanremo remains a singular success. On Tuesday, the opening evening, almost 17 million television viewers were registered during prime time, an incredible market share of 65 percent. On the following television evenings and nights, which lasted until the early hours of the morning on the five days of the festival, there were always an average of more than ten million viewers. And in place of Ferragni's slogans for Coca-Cola, the government in Rome, for example, called on the (television) people to subscribe to government bonds during the commercial breaks: “an advantageous return, especially for small investors”.
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