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, in paraphrase

The lyrics are under copyright, so we do not reproduce the verses. In plain prose: the singer thinks a dream like this will never come back. In the dream he painted his hands and his face blue, and then, all of a sudden, the wind swept him up and he began to fly through an endless sky. The chorus is simply the joy of it — flying, singing, up there in the painted blue, happy to stay.

A small dream, an entire grammar tour.

Grammar in action

Penso che + congiuntivo

The opening line thinks its way into doubt — the singer thinks that a dream like this will never return. Pensare che (to think that), when expressing personal opinion or belief about a non-fact, requires the subordinate verb in the congiuntivo presente.

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 — painted his hands (once, done), got carried off (once, done), began to fly (once, done) — 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.

Felice di + infinito — and stare, and lassù

The chorus closes on being happy to stay up there — 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 turns its two verbs — volare, cantare — into the bare infinitive as a noun. They aren't commands or parts of verb phrases; they name the activities themselves, 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 chorus is built almost entirely without finite verbs: two bare infinitives, a prepositional phrase built on the title, and an adjectival phrase. 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.