Anna Oxa

Anna Oxa, born Anna Hoxha (Bari, 28 April 1961), is an Italian singer and TV presenter with Albanian citizenship. She began performing as a child in the piano bars of her hometown, accompanied on piano by the Bari-based maestro Sabino Sciannelli, and at the age of 15 recorded her first 7-inch single for a small Bari label, featuring the song "Fiorellin del prato", a track written by Mario Panzeri years earlier.

She made her debut in 1978 with the album "Oxanna" and the single "Un'emozione da poco", one of the best-known songs in her repertoire, destined to go down in the history of the Sanremo Festival and of Italian pop.

Over the course of her career as a performer she has released a huge number of albums, collaborating with artists such as Fausto Leali, Ivano Fossati, Lucio Dalla, Rino Gaetano, Giorgio Gaber and Roberto Vecchioni. She has also reinterpreted songs by Claudio Baglioni, Francesco De Gregori, Fabio Concato and Lucio Battisti, as well as covers of Patti Smith and John Lennon. She has taken part in the Sanremo Festival fourteen times, winning on two occasions: the first in 1989 with "Ti lascerò", a duet with Fausto Leali, and the second in 1999, as a solo artist, with "Senza pietà". She also came close to winning in 1978 ("Un'emozione da poco", runner-up behind Matia Bazar, first among the newcomers and second among the established performers) and in 1997 ("Storie", runner-up behind Jalisse).

Anna Oxa has been married three times: first to musician Franco Ciani, then to Behgjet Pacolli, a Kosovar businessman and politician, and third to Marco Sansonetti, one of her former bodyguards. All three marriages ended in divorce. She also had a long relationship with New Trolls drummer Gianni Belleno, with whom she had both her children, Francesca and Qazim. In 2020 she was granted Albanian citizenship.

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