During Frank Sinatra’s Italian tour in 1953 a number of episodes took place, half amusing, half actually somewhat unfortunate. It was not a good moment for the singer. In the United States new arrivals such as Frankie Laine and Johnny Ray, seemed to be more successful. 1952 was the year he hit the bottom. His records didn’t sell, he appeared less and less on TV and cinema had all but abandoned him. Also his private life was on the down. He had left his wife and three children and owed over $ 100.000 in taxes, whilst for the rest he did nothing other than have fights in airports and hotels round the world with his second wife, Ava Gardner, and the photo reporters who tried to take photos of them. The actress’s great success did nothing but worsen the situation, for one and all he was now an ex singer who followed his beautiful and famous wife around. To save him from this landslide was the destiny of yet another Italo-American, Angelo Maggio. Columbia had just bought the rights to ‘From Here to Eternity’, a mega-novel by James Jones, giving Fred Zinnemann, the director who had in that very year broken all box office records with ‘High Noon’, the task of turning it into a film. Sinatra had fallen in love with that character and was convinced that the part of that Italian soldier Maggio, all skin and bones and who was to die in a concentration camp due to the maltreatment he suffered there, would have raised his fortunes once more. Sinatra – who took 150.000 per film – offered to do the part for the basic union pay of $ 1.000 a week. He was proved right because ‘From Here to Eternity’ won as many as 8 Oscars and he took the one for best non protagonist actor. Unfortunately, when Sinatra arrived in Italy in 1953, the film hadn’t yet come out. His Italian tour was somewhat of a disaster and the singer showed signs of being stressed and demoralised. It was in those days that Rai asked him to record a programme for ‘Radio Club’, a radio show that was to become myth. Sinatra arrived very punctually in the Via Asiago studios, but the director on duty, as he greeted him, remembered that his illustrious guest did not at all like singing in a cold empty hall. That realised, in minutes, employees, errand boys, secretaries, caretakers and visitors were slung into the hall as ‘public’. Indeed, so as to warm up the atmosphere, it was decided to have a young singer sing before Sinatra, in truth better known as actor, who was often seen wondering around the studios in search of work. That singer was Domenico Modugno, who, although from Puglia, passed himself off as Sicilian, as the island’s folk repertoire offered a better choice. He sang with more conviction than usual, sure to please the celebrated Italo-American. Modugno’s role was so marginal in that occasion that in the artistic reports he was indicated as Salvatore, but this did not stop him from singing a splendid ‘Ninna Nanna’ lullaby written by Franco Nebbia, pianist, jazz player, cabaret artist and future conductor of the programme ‘Il Gambero’, one of Italian radio’s most successful programmes ever. Sinatra was intrigued to know what that young curly haired man had sung to have met with such applause. Mimmo, as he was also later known, showed him a piece of paper with the words of the song he’d just sung, and that he had presented without success at a programme for amateurs some months earlier. The singer read the text, showed interest and stuck the note in his coat pocket and, after chatting with the youngster in friendly tones, said goodbye affectionately. This was enough for the Rai managers present, who hadn’t missed a beat, that youth had a future. It would be best to sign him up. Indeed, that was exactly what Modugno had hoped for. The record fully evokes the atmosphere of that long passed 20th May 1953, when a banal recording defined the career of the most original of Italian singers of all time, also posing the basis for the moral and artistic re-launching of a great singer such as Sinatra, here well assisted and directed by Armando Trovajoli. The encounter of ‘The Voice’ with the Roman pianist and music director was so successful both from an artistic and human point of view that, years later, Quincy Jones, the prince of modern arrangers, on tour in Italy, asked to meet Trovajoli personally, having remembered what Sinatra had told him about the brilliant composer. After all, the two instrumental themes played by Trovajoli’s orchestra, over and above being perfectly contextualised, are by no means less interesting than the others. After fifty years the material born of that memorable event has been brought back to light, thanks to a work of restoration, that over and above the highly sophisticated technical treatment used, also incorporates and artistic sensibility such as to exalt the whole value of this product. A publication that will doubtless intrigue the newcomer, filling the expert with enthusiasm, the lover of this genre of evergreen and great radio.