Song Lyrics: Volare (Modugno)

If Azzurro is Italy's unofficial second anthem, Nel blu dipinto di blu — universally known by its chorus, Volare — is the country's most famous musical export. Written by Domenico Modugno and Franco Migliacci, sung by Modugno at the 1958 Sanremo Festival (which it won) and at Eurovision the same year (where it placed second but won the world), Volare sold over twenty million copies, was covered by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, David Bowie, and Gipsy Kings, and still functions, six and a half decades later, as Italian shorthand for "joy."

This page takes a few representative verses and uses them to teach the grammar of the dream-narrative — a register that turns out to involve more imperfetto, more congiuntivo, and more substantivized infinitives than any B1 textbook quite prepares you for.

The artist and the song

Domenico Modugno (1928-1994) was a singer, songwriter, and actor from Apulia who became one of the foundational figures of modern Italian popular music. Before Volare, Italian canzonetta had been dominated by orchestral romance and Neapolitan classics; Modugno's performance — open arms outstretched on the Sanremo stage as he sang Volare, oh oh — broke with that tradition and announced a new, more emotionally direct, more cinematic Italian song.

The song's premise is a small surrealism: the narrator dreams that he paints his hands and face blue, and is then carried off into the sky by the wind. The chorus simply rejoices in the act of flying. It is a song about the imagination as escape — and about how Italian, with its rich tense system, can describe imagined action as if it were happening.

The text (representative verses)

The full lyrics are under copyright. Below are a few of the most-cited verses, used here for grammatical commentary under fair use.

Penso che un sogno così non ritorni mai più, mi dipingevo le mani e la faccia di blu. Poi d'improvviso venivo dal vento rapito, e incominciavo a volare nel cielo infinito.

Volare, oh oh, cantare, oh oh oh oh, nel blu dipinto di blu, felice di stare lassù.

A few verses, an entire grammar tour.

Grammar in action

Penso che + congiuntivo

The opening line — Penso che un sogno così non ritorni mai più — is a textbook trigger for the congiuntivo presente. Pensare che (to think that), when expressing personal opinion or belief about a non-fact, requires the subordinate verb in the subjunctive.

Ritorni is the third-person singular congiuntivo presente of ritornare. The indicative form would be ritorna — but ritorna would imply objective fact, which is not what the singer means. He's expressing a subjective doubt: I think (but I don't know for certain) that a dream like this won't come back.

The triggers in this family — pensare che, credere che, sembrare che, supporre che, immaginare che, dubitare che — all reach for congiuntivo because they introduce subjective evaluation rather than asserted fact. Compare:

Mai più — strengthened never

Non... mai più is the standard Italian way to say "never again." It pairs three negative elements:

• non — the standard preverbal negator
• mai — "ever / never"
• più — "more / no longer"

Together: "not ever more" → "never again." The construction is fixed, and dropping any of the three changes the meaning:

The three-part non... mai più is the strongest of the three — it combines temporal "never" with terminative "no more" into one compact phrase.

The cascade of imperfetto

Now the heart of the song's grammar: mi dipingevo... venivo... incominciavo. Three verbs, all in the imperfetto, all describing the dream-action.

Why imperfetto and not passato prossimo? Because the dream isn't being narrated as a sequence of completed events. It's being inhabited — the singer is back inside the dream, painting his hands, being lifted by the wind, beginning to fly, all at once, as a continuous, immersive scene. The imperfetto is the tense of duration, of "while," of "in the middle of." It's the tense you use when you want the listener to be inside the action, not watching it from outside.

If Modugno had used the passato prossimo — Mi sono dipinto le mani... sono stato rapito... ho cominciato a volare — the song would feel like an after-the-fact report. The imperfetto puts us inside the experience.

Why imperfetto for an imagined dream?

A subtle point worth lingering on: the dream never actually happened. Why is the imperfetto — a tense of past reality — used to describe an imagined event?

Because imagined sustained action shares the aspectual profile of habitual or descriptive past action: it's framed as ongoing, durative, inside-the-scene. Italian doesn't reserve imperfetto for things that "really happened" — it reserves it for actions presented as ongoing or background, real or otherwise. Compare:

The imperfetto in Volare does the same work: it builds an inhabited interior scene, regardless of whether the scene corresponds to anything in the external world.

Dipingevo... rapito... dipinto: forms of dipingere

Three forms of dipingere (to paint) appear in these verses:

• dipingevo — imperfetto, 1st person singular: "I was painting"
• dipinto — past participle: "painted"
• (and earlier: dipingere — infinitive)

Because dipinto is irregular (not dipingu-to but dipinto, with consonant change), it's worth a flag. Other Italian verbs with the -into irregular participle pattern include spingere (spinto), vincere (vinto), cingere (cinto), and piangere (pianto). All -nC-stems converge on -nto for the participle.

In nel blu dipinto di blu — "in the blue painted blue" — dipinto is being used adjectivally, modifying the implicit noun cielo (sky): "in the [sky-]blue painted blue." This is a poetic doubling — blue painted onto blue, the sky absorbing more of itself — that gives the line its visual force.

Stare + di + infinito-stative: felice di stare lassù

The final line in this excerpt — felice di stare lassù — uses three elements worth flagging:

1. felice di + infinitive — adjectives of emotion plus di plus infinitive. This is a high-frequency Italian construction: contento di vederti, felice di sentirti, triste di partire, stanco di aspettare. The di is required; an English speaker may want to drop it.

2. stare rather than essere. Stare in Italian is not just a synonym of essere. It often means "to be in a place / to remain / to stay," with a stronger sense of location or duration. Stare lassù is "to be up there / to remain up there," with a sense of dwelling.

3. lassù, the location adverb (compare quassù in Azzurro). The full set is quassù, lassù, quaggiù, laggiù.

Volare, cantare — the substantivized infinitive

The chorus's Volare, oh oh / cantare, oh oh oh oh uses the bare infinitive as a noun. Volare and cantare aren't being used as commands or as parts of verb phrases — they're being used as the names of activities, which Italian (like most Romance languages) does effortlessly with the bare infinitive.

English uses two forms for this — the gerund ("flying," "singing") or the to-infinitive ("to fly," "to sing") — and the choice matters in English. Italian uses only the bare infinitive, which is one of the few places where Italian is less rich than English in form, but compensates with cleaner syntax.

The shape of the chorus: vocatives and exclamatives

The oh oh of the chorus isn't grammar in the technical sense — it's vocalic exclamation, the Italian "lalala" — but it's worth noting that the song's chorus is built almost entirely without finite verbs. Volare, cantare, nel blu dipinto di blu, felice di stare lassù. Two infinitives, a prepositional phrase, an adjectival phrase — and that's the whole emotional core. Italian song uses verbless or non-finite chunks more freely than English, and Volare is a brilliant example.

Vocabulary: dreams and joy

The song's vocabulary cluster covers dreams, sky, color, and elevation:

• il sogno — dream
• il cielo — sky
• infinito — infinite, endless
• il vento — wind
• rapito (past participle of rapire, "to abduct, kidnap, carry off") — carried away, ravished
• dipinto (past participle of dipingere) — painted
• azzurro / blu — sky-blue / dark blue
• felice — happy
• lassù — up there
• volare — to fly
• cantare — to sing

Note the emotional difference between azzurro and blu: azzurro is the lighter, cleaner sky-blue, the color of the Italian summer sky and the national football team (gli Azzurri). Blu is the darker, deeper, more saturated blue. Volare uses both — Nel blu dipinto di blu — possibly to emphasize the deeper, more intense blue of the painted dream against the lighter blue of the sky.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• Volare (officially Nel blu dipinto di blu) is one of the most internationally famous Italian songs, written and performed by Domenico Modugno, who won Sanremo and placed second at Eurovision in 1958.
• Penso che / Credo che trigger the congiuntivo because they introduce subjective belief, not factual assertion.
• The cascade of imperfetto verbs (dipingevo, venivo, incominciavo) puts the listener inside the dream-scene rather than reporting it from outside. Imperfetto is for immersion; passato prossimo is for reporting.
• Felice / contento / stanco / triste + di + infinito is the standard pattern for emotional adjectives plus an action.
• The bare infinitive doubles as the name of an activity — volare = "flying," cantare = "singing." No gerund needed.
• The four location adverbs quassù, quaggiù, lassù, laggiù are single words; the song uses lassù in a parallel role to quassù in Azzurro.

For more on the imperfetto, see the imperfect overview. For the subjunctive after opinion verbs, see triggers — opinion verbs. For the comparison companion piece, see Azzurro. To return to the broader context, see the Annotated Texts overview.