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Italy to perform Sanremo winner in Eurovision

18 March 2013 at 12:17 CET

The Italian entry for Malmö has just been announced by Rai 2, Italy's broadcaster of the Eurovision Song Contest. The artist had already been announced during the Sanremo Festival final, and it turned out to be the winner himself, Marco Mengoni.

He will perform L'Essenziale (The Essential) which is also the winning song of Sanremo and already a top-selling hit in Italy. The entry will be sung entirely in Italian and it is written by Marco Mengoni, Roberto Casalino and Francesco De Benedettis.



The winners of the Sanremo Song Festival were the Italian entries at the Eurovision Song Contest in the period 1956-1966. Then it also happened in selected years. The last time that the Sanremo winner became the Eurovision entry was in 1997 when Jalisse represented Italy with Fiumi Di Parole.

The Sanremo experience

In mid February the hugely popular Italian Song Contest, Festival di Sanremo, held its 63rd edition. During five nights the 22 participating artists introduced their songs to the Italian audience and competed in the two categories, newcomers and established acts.

On Saturday the 16th of February the established acts final, which you could follow here with Eurovision.tv in our Web TV streaming, took place. It was announced then that the artist that would represent Italy at the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest would be Marco Mengoni. Minutes later he was crowned as well winner of the Festival with L'Essenziale.

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The composers

Marco Mengoni is the composer of L'Essenziale together with Roberto Casalino and Francesco De Benediittis.

Roberto Casalino, born in avellino in 1979, is one of the most succesful songwriters of his generation.

He starts his career as a backing singer for Tiziano Ferro in 2002 before releasing his first solo album L'Atmosfera Nascosta in 2004.

Throughout the years he became mainly a songwriter , writing several hits for artists like Giusy Ferreri,(two songs co-written with Tiziano Ferro for her 5 time platinum debut album) and many other superstars like Emma Marrone,Syria, Alessandra Amoroso and the 2012 X-Factor winner Francesca Michielin (with the song Distratto co-written with Elisa).

This year, he returns to Sanremo Festival, after writing in 2012 Per Sempre for Nina Zilli, with L'Essenziale for Marco Mengoni. The song wins Sanremo and will also represent Italy at the Eurovision Song contest in Malmo.

Francesco De Benedittis was trained in piano for 5 years. He becomes a professional sound engineer after a master at the prestigious School of Audio Technology College in Milan.

He becomes fond of electronic mastering, the art of synth and sequencer and starts collaborating with Davide Esposito writing many hits for the French Market for artists like Kelly Joyce (Vivre la Vie #1 in Italy, Belgium, France and Switzerland), the Star Academy winner Elodie Fredge, Gregory Lemarchal, Mario Pelchat, Florent Pagny, Sylvie Vartan and the Australian star Tina Arena.

He also wrote hits for Nek, Francesco Renga and Marco Carta.

This year presented two songs for Sanremo, one co-written with Max Gazze, and the winning song L'Essenziale. He is constantly involved with his studio "Naive Recording Studio" as songwriter, producer and arranger.