The song L’Italiano begins with "Lasciatemi cantare/Con la chitarra ai mano" ("Let me sing/With the guitar in my hands"). First comes the slightly husky voice of its singer and songwriter Toto Cutugno, then an acoustic guitar, violins and a mandolin as a counterpoint. The composer of over 300 melodies for himself and others, including his fellow Italians Ornella Vanoni and Adriano Celentano and several French pop stars, Cutugno will be publicly famous for the 1983 hit L’Italiano (lyrics by Cristiano Minellono). Salvatore Cutugno, known as Toto Cutugno, died on Tuesday, August 22, in Milan, aged 80. His manager broke the news in the late afternoon, saying that "the singer’s condition had worsened in recent months following a long illness."

Born on July 7, 1943, in Fosdinovo, Tuscany, the second of three children, Cutugno grew up in La Spezia, Liguria. His father, a Sicilian naval non-commissioned officer, was a trumpeter in the municipal brass band. In an interview with Le Monde in 2018, Toto Cutugno summed up his introduction to music in just a few words: "My father (...) took me to a rehearsal when I was eight, and the conductor asked him if I could play the marching drum. From the drum, I moved on to the drum kit, then the accordion and the piano."

He played the drums in his first two bands, Ghigo e i Goghi, about which little is known today, and Toto e i Tati, founded in 1965. Toto e i Tati recorded a handful of 7-inch records up to the end of the 1960s, and scored a minor hit in Italy with La Ragazza Della Spiaggia, a whimsical pop song with choirs, an organ and violins. His next group, Albatros, founded in 1974 with the help of lyricist and producer Vito Pallavicini, offered a little more substance.

Cutugno was the lead singer, recording several singles and an album until 1978. Some of the group’s songs were adapted into French, the most well-known among them being Africa, the story of a Black American singer who encourages a return to Africa, sung in English by Cutugno. In 1975 the song was adapted as L’Été Indien for French singer-songwriter Joe Dassin by lyricists Claude Lemesle and Pierre Delanoë. In 1976, Dassin also sang Monja Monja which became Il Était Une Fois Nous Deux while Nel Cuore Nei Sensi became Voici Les Clefs for singer-songwriter Gérard Lenorman.

At the end of the 1970s, Toto Cutugno collaborated with French music stars. He wrote En Chantant for singer Michel Sardou in 1976, even as he rose to major fame in Italy with his second solo album, Voglio l’Anima; of which the eponymous track was adapted for singer and actress Dalida in 1979 under the title Laissez-moi Danser. In the early 1980s, he released Solo Noi (1980), whose title track won him a prize at the San Remo Festival – in which he participated over a dozen times with such hits as Innamorata, Innamorato, Innamorati (1981), La Mia Musica (1982) and, perhaps most famously, the L’Italiano album in 1983.

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