Following their win at the
Sanremo Music Festival 2021 in the "Big Artists" category with "
Zitti e buoni", Måneskin was chosen to represent
Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest 2021, which they went on to win. During the event, the band's frontman
Damiano David had been accused of taking cocaine, however the allegations turned out to be false, since the singer passed a voluntary drug test. After the contest, Måneskin felt inspired and happy, and a few days later they wrote "Mammamia" in a few hours. Their intention was to create a song that is "funny and entertaining", instead of something "too serious or too heavy", however they touched on being misunderstood and misjudged by media in the lyrics. The band's bassist,
Victoria De Angelis, said: "We didn't take it too seriously. It's a very silly, careless song and we've never done something like that before. It came together very naturally. We just tried to have fun and enjoy it, because [it was written] in a moment where we were experiencing a lot of things." Before the single's release, Måneskin members had been spotted wearing belts with "Mammamia" written on them. On September 30, 2021, the band announced release of "Mammamia". Its cover art shows David sliding his hand down the pants wearing a "Mammamia" belt. In the following days, the group members posted the song's snippets to video-sharing app
TikTok, while on their
Twitter, they posted nude pictures of themselves with the caption "Why so hot?" On the day of its release, the track also impacted Italian radio
airplay through
Sony Music, with the title capitalised. Also on 8 October 2021,
Arista Records serviced it to the US
alternative,
hot adult contemporary, and
mainstream radio formats. ==Music and lyrics==