O sole mio (1898)

Unfortunately for himself and his heirs, Eduardo Di Capua sold the rights on O sole mio for a mere 25 lira on its publication round about 1900. He was not to know that it would be recorded by generations of big-name singers, from Caruso to Pavarotti, that it would become the most famous of all Neapolitan popular songs and that, at the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920, it would be performed instead of the Royal March as the Italian national anthem. Nor could he possibly have guessed that it would be rewritten in 1949 as “There’s no tomorrow” for Tony Martin and rewritten again in 1960 as “Now or never”for Elvis Presley, who recorded it and sold two million copies of the single. It owes its phenomenal success to its original melodic inspiration - Giovanni Capurro’s words clearly meant much to a homesick Italian musician working in the Ukraine at the time he wrote the song - and to the positively operatic quality of the refrain “Ma n’atu sole.”