A historic duet

Franco Battiato's career has always been marked by unpredictability. "You mustn't cater to the audience, you must defy their expectations" was his mantra, translated into a constant pursuit of experimentation, even within pop music. But the concept also found expression through disorienting moves and surprise appearances. One of the most unpredictable dates back to 1984, when the master from Ionia even ended up on the Eurovision Song Contest stage, one of the most jarring settings imaginable, with its kitsch aesthetic and its unbridled taste for the spectacular.

At the time, there was no rule stating that the Eurovision slot automatically went to the winner of the Sanremo Festival, so, under pressure from his managers, Battiato overcame his initial and understandable reluctance and agreed to take part in the contest. Riding an unstoppable wave of success that had swept him up over the previous three years, thanks above all to albums like "His Master's Voice", but also "L'arca di Noè" and "Orizzonti perduti", as well as a string of hits written for fellow artists such as Giuni Russo ("Un'estate al mare"), Milva ("Alexander Platz") and Alice, who had triumphed at Sanremo three years earlier with her "Per Elisa". It was Alice herself who joined him on stage at the Théâtre Municipal in Luxembourg, in a performance that remains memorable to this day.

The chosen song was the splendid "I treni di Tozeur", written by the Sicilian singer-songwriter together with Saro Cosentino (lyrics) and his trusted collaborator Giusto Pio (music). At Eurovision, amid that riot of technicolor effects, Battiato and Alice — he visibly more uneasy, she more self-assured, even on the high notes — delivered a sober, almost chilly performance, far removed from the show's usual theatrics. Battiato did nothing to win over the audience or the press, and only on the advice of Rai commentator Antonio De Robertis did he take off his ever-present sunglasses. The song, elegant and visionary, was a perfect example of Battiato's poetics: the title evoked a place suspended between myth and reality, Tozeur, an oasis town among the first you come across after Douz, standing at the edge of a vast salt lake. There, under a sun that scorches the horizon, the phenomenon known as the "fata morgana" occurs: shimmering visions that have always confused the steps of travellers. In the past, people spoke of glimpsing lines of caravans, mirages of camels and merchants suspended in the blazing air; today those apparitions have changed shape and materialise as trains crossing the void, images of modernity reflected in the emptiness of the desert. Within the lyrics, this scenario intertwines with references to the thought of Georges Gurdjieff: the theme of self-remembering surfaces like a magic formula, a spell that calls attention back to consciousness and to one's own presence in the here and now. The ending, then, surprises with a German choir quoting a passage from Mozart's Magic Flute ("Doch wir wollen ihn dir zeigen, und du wirst"). A balance between the erudite and the popular, refinement and immediacy, unmatched by anything else in the competition.

The result of that performance was, all things considered, positive: fifth place out of nineteen entries, Italy's best Eurovision result in a decade, with 70 points total (tied with Belgium's Jacques Zegers). The contest was won, however, by three Swedish Mormon brothers, Herrey's, with "Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley", a song with little impact but backed by a far more spectacular performance. Battiato himself, years later, recounted the experience with irony: EMI had convinced them to take part, betting on a possible win. "Neither Alice nor I wanted to go: 'What Eurovision? We couldn't care less about it' — the Sicilian singer-songwriter would recall in a SkyArte special — They insisted, and in the end we treated it like a holiday, just to have a bit of fun. So before leaving there was a big meeting. They made their predictions: 'Let's not worry, Spain will give us 12 points, and so will France, Germany, Austria'. The night of the vote was hilarious. It started with France: 1 point; Germany: 2 points. After six or seven countries we were in last place. Then came the comeback, with the last six countries. From Iceland, where they'd never even heard of us, we got 12 points. And then from Norway too".

Franco Battiato and Alice on the cover of Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni But despite not winning, "I treni di Tozeur" earned immediate recognition: it reached the top 20 in several European countries, hit number twenty in Italy and, the following year, was included in the soundtrack of Nanni Moretti's "La messa è finita". As for finding it on an album, though, listeners had to wait until 1985 for Battiato's "Mondi lontanissimi", and 1987 for Alice's "Elisir". Even today, many Eurovision fans consider that song one of the finest ever presented in the history of the contest.

The Eurovision appearance thus stands as one of the strangest episodes in the Sicilian artist's career: a long-forgotten interlude, yet one that captures the image of an artist who, even when thrust into a mainstream TV context, managed to impose his own unmistakable style. It was an episode that, paradoxically, helped bring new attention to the European contest in Italy, until then viewed with a certain disdain — so much so that, that year, the magazine Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni put Battiato and Alice on its cover.

The two would go on to pursue their solo careers in parallel, reuniting only occasionally, until 2016, when Battiato returned to share the stage with Alice for what would prove to be one of his final tours (in 2017, just a few months after that string of concerts, his management cancelled all his live performances).

Franco Battiato left us in 2021, but the impact of his songs remains undiminished to this day, including "I treni di Tozeur", which has even been covered in Finnish (by singer Seija Simola, in 1984) and in Dutch, by the duo Sasha & Davy ("Eeuwig bij elkaar", 2014). Nothing, of course, comparable to that magical 1984 duet that, for once, gave Italian singer-songwriter music a place on the Eurovision stage.

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02/02/2026