Many of the Neapolitan songs are world-famous because they were taken abroad by
emigrants from Naples and southern Italy, roughly between 1880 and 1920. The music also was popularized abroad by performers such as
Enrico Caruso, who took to singing the popular music of his native city as encores at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York in the early 1900s. Caruso also recorded many of these songs, which subsequently became part of the standard repertoire for operatic tenors, and which were performed and recorded by such notable singers as
Beniamino Gigli,
Francesco Albanese,
Franco Corelli,
Mario Del Monaco,
Giuseppe Di Stefano, and
Tito Schipa.
The Three Tenors also performed popular songs from Naples.
Plácido Domingo recorded a full CD
Italia ti amo of traditional and some more modern Neapolitan and Italian songs.
Luciano Pavarotti recorded three albums of Neapolitan and Italian songs:
The Best: Disc 2, (2005),
Pavarotti Songbook, (1991), and
Romantica, (2002).
Mario Lanza recorded an acclaimed selection of 12 Neapolitan songs on his 1959 album,
Mario! Lanza at His Best. Opera/pop crossover tenor,
Sergio Franchi recorded his very popular
Billboard Top 25 RCA debut album,
Romantic Italian Songs in 1962, and continued to record Neapolitan songs on most of his albums throughout his career.
Andrea Bocelli recorded an album in 2009 dedicated to the style, entitled
Incanto. The most important native Neapolitan performers of Neapolitan songs in the last few decades include
Roberto Murolo,
Bruno Venturini,
Mario Trevi,
Mario Abbate,
Mario Merola,
Giulietta Sacco,
Franco Ricci,
Sergio Bruni,
Renato Carosone, and
Mario Maglione. Murolo is known not only as a singer and guitarist, but also as a composer, scholar and collector of the music; his collection of twelve
LPs, released in the 1960s, is an annotated compendium of Neapolitan song dating back to the twelfth century. Representatives of different veins, but nevertheless leading the continuing tradition of song in Neapolitan, are the jazz-rock singer-songwriter
Pino Daniele and the folkloric group
Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare;
Almamegretta and
99 posse are representative of a blend of Neapolitan songs and dub/trip hop, with the former appearing in a song with the Bristol duo
Massive Attack. All Neapolitan songs are written and performed in the
Neapolitan language. Although the music is sung by many non-Neapolitan singers, it is difficult to sing correctly without knowledge of the Neapolitan dialect, which is crucial in obtaining the correct inflection. The matter of dialect has not prevented a few non-Neapolitans from writing dialect versions of Neapolitan songs. The most famous examples of this are ''
'A vucchella'' by
Gabriele D'Annunzio and ''
Tu sì 'na cosa grande'' by
Domenico Modugno. Since the second half of the 2010s, a new sub-set of Neapolitan music has begun to emerge which mixed various traditional elements with aspects of
hip hop,
electronic,
techno and
urban music. Among the major representatives of this "new school" we find
Liberato,
Geolier and
Clementino. ==List of songs==