Dio e Morto

Gianna Nannini concluded her 2011 album Io e Te with a hard rock version of Domenico Modugno's "Volare," presumably intended half as a joke and half in earnest. The same track (albeit in a slightly edited version) also closes 2014's Hitalia, but it has now become a grand finale rather than a gimmick, as the full-blown cover album Hitalia is Nannini's tribute to the Great Italian Songbook. Alas, it is more a spirited than an inspired one. To begin with, Nannini's choices could not have been more obvious: every single one of these 17 songs is an Italian cultural icon and most have been covered to death by any number of artists. Moreover, there is not much chronological or stylistic range either, as 12 come from the 1960s, and roughly half of those were styled for the Sanremo Festival – a more accurate title for Hitalia could have been Gianna Nannini Sings the Monster Hits of her Adolescence.

Born September 22, 1934, to a Milanese family, Italian singer Ornella Vanoni spent most of her twenties alternating between theater (her debut was in 1957 with Federico Zardi's I Giacobini) and music. She started by singing "le canzoni della mala," or songs about the underworld, but after meeting Gino Paoli in 1960 (with whom she wrote "Senza Fine," one of her biggest hits) she began exploring the more sentimental sounds of pop.