Volare: The Third-Place Song That Conquered the World

MAY 15 1958 · 12:10

Domenico Modugno · "Nel blu, dipinto di blu (Volare)" · Italy · 1958 Placement: 3rd · Language: Italian · Composers: Domenico Modugno, Franco Migliacci · Venue: AVRO Studios · Host: Hilversum, Netherlands · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: pre color On March 12, 1958, at the AVRO Studios in Hilversum, a Sicilian singer and songwriter named Domenico Modugno stepped forward with arms stretched wide and began to sing 'Nel blu, dipinto di blu' — soon to be known worldwide simply as 'Volare.' He had co-written the song with Franco Migliacci in Rome weeks earlier, the lyric imagining a man who paints himself blue and flies into the sky. Modugno's Eurovision performance was, by most accounts, technically imperfect — he was exhausted, jet-lagged from a transatlantic flight — and the jury placed Italy third behind France and Switzerland. But within months 'Volare' had entered the U.S. Billboard charts, climbed to number one in August 1958, held that position for five of the year's final weeks, sold millions of copies in multiple languages, and won the first Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the inaugural 1959 Grammys. A third-place Eurovision finish had produced the year's biggest-selling global single. Context Eurovision 1958 was only the third edition of the contest and was hosted in the Netherlands following the Dutch win in 1957. Italy had participated from the first contest in 1956 and had submitted the winner of its own Sanremo Festival each year — a selection tradition that continues. Modugno had won Sanremo in February 1958 with 'Volare,' making him Italy's automatic Eurovision entrant. The song arrived at a moment when American popular music had been dominant globally for a decade; an Italian-language song breaking into the U.S. charts, let alone topping them, was without real precedent. The broadcast was black-and-white, the audience was small, and the EBU was still refining contest rules — Eurovision in 1958 was closer to a televised music conference than a spectacle. Legacy 'Volare' is the single strongest counter-argument to the assumption that Eurovision's impact is measured by winning. It remains the most commercially successful song ever associated with the contest, outside of ABBA's 'Waterloo' and Måneskin's 'Zitti e buoni.' Dean Martin's 1958 English-language cover became a standard, as did dozens of subsequent versions by Gipsy Kings, Il Volo, and others. Modugno's arms-wide stage gesture is referenced in nearly every Eurovision retrospective documentary. For Italy, the 1958 result helped establish Sanremo-to-Eurovision as a viable international star-launching pipeline — a lineage that runs through Toto Cutugno, Al Bano and Romina Power, and ultimately to Måneskin's 2021 win. Mythology 'Volare' is frequently misremembered as a Eurovision winner; it placed third. The Grammy wins are sometimes attributed to the Eurovision performance specifically, but the Grammy-recognized recording was Modugno's studio single, not the live Eurovision version. The song's U.S. success is occasionally credited entirely to Dean Martin's cover; Modugno's original outsold Martin's version in most markets.