From "Dirty Talk" to Fantaghirò’s “Mio Nemico”: Spotlight on Rossana Casale

When Italo Disco Met Sword and Sorcery

It’s almost holiday time in Italy, which means that at least two generations will tune in at unlikely hours to watch the 1991-1996 miniseries Fantaghirò, which airs whenever there’s an available time slot on Mediaset channels. Luckily, it’s available on Mediaset Infinity in Italy and on other platforms of varying degrees of legitimacy worldwide (it was on Eternal TV for some time).

When director Lamberto Bava was getting his sword-and-sorcery miniseries Fantaghirò ready to debut for the 1991 Holiday season, he was envisioning a soundtrack that would match its mood: he wanted a crossover between classical and folk music to convey the pagan and medieval atmospheres. “One night, as I was watching TV, I saw Amedeo Minghi perform,” Bava wrote in his autobiography Il Maestro del Terrore. “It was his moment, and I was told to just forget about it: he was too busy and would never make time for us.”

Bava did not relent, and somehow obtained Minghi’s phone number and called him. That call determined that, while being flattered, Minghi just did not have the time. Again, Bava did not give up, and just sent Minghi the script. After two weeks of radio silence, where the rest of the production team was getting antsy because the show still did not have any music, Minghi rang Bava and told him to just stop by his studio. “He was struck by Fantaghirò’s magic as well: now Fantaghirò had images, a heart, and a soul, and could finally embark on her quest.” Each of the five film-length episodes see princess Fantaghirò, played by Alessandra Martines, as the main heroine, with male leads such as Romualdo (Kim Rossi Stuart) and foe-to-foil Tarabas (Nicholas Rogers) barely keeping up with her. Bombshells Ursula Andress and Brigitte Nielsen played the villains.

The highlight is the theme song “Mio Nemico,” which is written in such a way that the lyrics are made to resemble some mock-medieval Italian dialect (despite their being in standardized Italian).

This effect is rendered through Rossana Casale’s vocalizing and artful rendition of the vowel sounds: the opening, where Casale sings “Chi amo, ed ama me” sounds like one arcane word, and it fully contributes to the worldbuilding of Bava’s fantasy world. The song recreates the “enemies to lovers” trope, which is an overarching plotline throughout the series, especially because Romualdo is an enemy in the first arc, then gets his memory wiped in the second, thus becoming a minion of the main villain; in the third and fourth installments, he gets petrified and then turned into a Gollum-like creature, and she is always the one who saves the day.

What’s interesting in this song is that the American-born Rossana Casale, who started out as a backup singer for the likes of Mina and Al Bano, between 1979 and 1984, made a name for herself in the Italo Disco Scene. She was part of projects such as Eva Eva Eva, Casanova, Bizzy & Co, Pink Project, Kano, N.O.I.A, and Miss Mystery.

“ A Uno,” which she performed under the alias “Miss Mystery,” combines your standard disco-era instrumental base with her crystalline vocals, and it plays with the pun between “a uno” and “you know” and “are you, now?” There’s not a lot of vocal virtuosity involved, as she performs in a combination of a recitativo and citypop-like affectation. She is by no means playing a femme-fatale role with these vocals (à la Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”), as they remain playfully coquettish. Still, “A Uno” remains an invaluable time capsule that masterfully exemplifies the changing tides between the 1970s and the 1980s.

Alongside Klein+ M.B.O., she recorded “More Dirty Talk,” the follow up to their track “Dirty Talk,” which is only instrumental. Initially, it was just a local Milanese production but it became an underground hit. Allegedly, this song inspired New Order in the writing of their hit song “Blue Monday.”

This song is also featured in the 2005 Pet Shop Boys anthology Back To Mine: Pet Shop Boys.” It stands out for its multi-layered arrangement and for Casale’s top-of-the-register vocalizing, which some would call shrill, but still indicate full command of her voice. The lyrics barely touch on dirty talk, though. In their borderline non-sensical English, highlights include: “There's another side of you/And you can make your dream come true/ Visions of the love we knew/I wonder if this talk will do” and “A part of you was [?]/ How can this love be heavenly?/The truth is that you're just for me/ Now hear my words and you will see.”

There is also the persistent rumor about Casale being the actual voice behind Vivien Vee’s releases, but this fact still remains disputed (if you have any intel, do share it in the comments!)

In 1984, she debuted as a soloist under her own name, and she always stood out in her career for combining commercial tunes with more sophisticated or experimental genres, including jazz, for example her 1989 Sanremo music festival entry, the jazz-inflected “A Che Servono Gli Dei” and her 1991 one “Terra,” which Italians ascribe to the genre of “world music.” In Casale’s sound, experimental elements coexist with nostalgia and an innate ethereal quality.

Overall, we wanted to share facts about Fantaghirò and “Mio Nemico” because a closer listening to that song reveals that all that separates if from Italo Disco is an apt instrumental base: not all Italo disco is uptempo, and should you swap the ethereal orchestral track with some reverb-heavy synths and a bass line with a robust backbeat, you’d have an Italo hit fit for both a Sword and Sorcery series or for a space opera.

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