How did ‘Sarà perché ti amo’ become Italy’s tourist anthem?
Italy has a place in every traveller’s heart and is amongst the bucket-list travel destinations, with such an array of amazing things to do and see.
The history is rich and complex, with incredible Roman remains across the country. You can catch a football match and experience the atmosphere you grew up watching on Football Italia on Channel 4, and you can even soak up the Mediterranean sun on one of Italy’s beautiful coastlines. You can eat your way through the country too, loading up on carbs as you inhale delicate pasta and the best pizza on the planet, struck by the freshness and sweetness of its tomatoes, and the incredible, salty, fatty taste of its meat.
All of those are quintessential parts of the traveller’s experience, but now there’s a new addition to the list, the uplifting chorus of ‘Sarà perché ti amo’, an earworm that’ll seep into your consciousness and never leave, and to make the experience more vivid, let us let the scene.
Picture the summer sun making way for a balmy, Italian evening, as you sit outside a restaurant with an ice-cold bottle of Peroni, halfway through the best seafood linguine you’ve ever tasted, when over in the square, you hear a song start to play with a bright, bouncy, playfully kitsch tone that is unmistakably 1980s. Within seconds, everyone at the restaurant is singing along, and before it’s finished, you’re already humming it, and you continue to do so, even as you walk through passport control on the way home.
Ricchi e Poveri’s ‘Sarà perché ti amo’ is lodged deep in your brain, every chord eliciting the hazy memories of sun, spritz and cobblestones, something that you and every other visitor to Italy have in common, whether you visited the north or the south, or anywhere in between. The pop group was formed in 1967 and built a following slowly over the next decade, even representing Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1978, but it wasn’t until the early ’80s, when they hit their commercial peak, and one song came to define them and their careers.
The band debuted ‘Sarà perché ti amo’ at the Sanremo Festival, and it instantly connected, with its depiction of mad, crazy, unbridled love. For non-native speakers such as me, it’s the uplifting chords and the incredibly bright synth that really turn this into a toe tapper. The song was a monster hit, reaching number one in Italy, France and Spain, back in the days when chart position mattered. It hit number two in Switzerland before going platinum in Italy and gold across the continent in Switzerland, Germany, France and Spain.
Like all great songs, its post-release cultural impact is what really cemented it as part of Italian life. If you’ve visited the San Siro, then you might remember it, with ‘Sarà perché ti amo’ becoming part of the pre-match ritual for AC Milan games. When the teams are ready to be announced, and 75,000 fans of the Rossoneri are singing along, it’s bound to get the hairs on the back of your neck going. It then became a song that was sung in piazzas and on restaurant terraces across the country.
It was this second life as a part of Italian culture that kept the song alive, but the third act came post-Covid-19, when it was rediscovered on social media, going viral on TikTok and Instagram. This saw the song re-enter the charts in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Switzerland between 2023 and 2025.
Now any visit to Italy isn’t complete without hearing ‘Sarà perché ti amo’ in a piazza, and social media is full of videos of local musicians playing the song, being joined by a local or visitor, and then the entire square erupting in an explosion of singing, dancing and mobile phones, such as a recent singalong at Piazza Trilussa, at the heart of Trastevere, Rome, that went viral, showing that it’s the epitome of what makes these videos so appealing, as everyone celebrates together.
The melody is instantly memorable, and even without knowing Italian, you can feel the expressiveness and the passion in the lyrics, wherein the music itself conveys the excitement and chaos of love perfectly. Every year, millions of people land in Italy expecting art, history and food, but alongside, they get a lesson in how pop music can become integral to the identity of a place. While watching somebody perform ‘Sarà perché ti amo’ in a piazza won’t be in your travel guide, it’s an essential part of visiting the country.
