DITONELLAPIAGA - Miss Italy

If with “Miss Italy” Ditonellapiaga wanted to express her discomfort at feeling “out of place” in this society, the grotesque legal dispute over the album's title triggered against her by Patrizia Mirigliani certainly gave her one more reason to feel that way. For days, “Miss Italy” risked having to change its name for some inexplicable reason, until (today) the Rome Court finally rejected the appeal. “How annoying!”, one might comment, quoting the Sanremo hit that forcefully boosted the stock of Rome-born Margherita Carducci, born in 1997. A practically perfect track, which stood head and shoulders above the dismal average of this year's Sanremo edition, with its acid-house groove entrusted to an analog Roland TB-303 synth, its sardonic list of trends and figures to loathe, and an interpretation that was both ironic and sensual.

Third place in the Ariston's final ranking, a streaming and airplay triumph – especially on radio – excellent critical reception and, last but not least, first place awarded to her by OndaRock readers in our Sanremo survey. A near-unanimous result, to which we should add her win in the cover night alongside TonyPitony, thanks to a delightful rendition of “The Lady Is A Tramp”. Everything has magically fallen into place in Ditonellapiaga's universe: sounds, make-up, look, videos, choreography, dance routines, gags, interviews. Without a single misstep.

And yet, beyond the beauty pageant organizer's grievances, the statuesque Roman singer still has to contend with the pitfalls of her role. Ditonellapiaga, in fact, is the classic figure forever balanced between the opposing risks of drawing the ire of haters, the wariness of music critics, the nerdy snobbery of industry insiders, or, conversely, becoming the object of blanket adoration from those very same groups. Hailed and awarded after her successful Sanremo duet with Rettore back in the days of “Chimica”, winner of the Targa Tenco for best debut work that same year, 2022, for the album “Camouflage”, she seemed to have gradually slipped off the media's radar and risked being cast aside by the establishment. A second album, “Flash” (Dischi Belli/Bmg, 2024), was far less fortunate than its predecessor, despite features with Coma Cose, Gaia and Fulminacci, followed by a long silence broken only by a few cameos (including one with Elodie and Ornella Vanoni on the cover of “Ti voglio”) and television appearances meant to give the world the impression she was still active.

Margherita Carducci makes no secret of the difficulties she has gone through, and given the authenticity of her persona, the reasons behind them are fairly clear. Aside from a stage name that isn't exactly easygoing, there's her ironic language and her love of pop that leaves the truly tough crowd out in the cold – the ones who don't dance, don't laugh, and don't get moved. Then there's an authorial personality so precise and well-defined that it can at times feel repetitive, coupled with a heterogeneous production palette that can throw off lazier or more prejudiced listeners. And then again, a loud, boisterous Roman-ness and a charismatic femininity, steeped in Hollywood glamour and shabby chic, complete with a Veronica Lake/Jessica Rabbit hairstyle, which have earned her adoration from the LGBTQIA+ community, but also plenty of gratuitous misogyny. And finally, we shouldn't overlook her explicit progressive stance, which has drawn the wrath of conservative keyboard warriors.

Faced with all this, on “Miss Italy” Ditonellapiaga decides to stay true to the project's raison d'être and sharpen its defining traits, picking up from the strongest tracks on her second album — “ILY”, “Mary” and “Non resisto”, made in tandem with Roman singer-songwriter and producer Whitemary — and doubling down on a smart, sharp, intrinsically millennial brand of electropop. It's inhabited by genuine anger and self-awareness, but also by an irresistible sense of humour. There's clever wordplay throughout, a mix of registers and allusions, blending high and low, urban metaphors and mainstream accessibility. So “Miss Italy” isn't just a beauty-pageant title — it's first and foremost a cliché, that of “the winner, the perfect woman, the one who never gets it wrong and embodies an absolute idea of success”, as she has explained in interviews. It's a figure gradually brought back down to a more fragile dimension, as on the title track, a biting reflection on the construction of image in which the figure of the Miss is hollowed out and called into question (“The luckiest one, a beauty queen/ and you can play with her heart/ she's a doll/ covering a tear with concealer”). And when she sings “hand me a razor blade in front of the mirror”, it's hard not to think of her muse Rettore in her “Kamikaze Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” incarnation.

Written and composed entirely by Ditonellapiaga together with Alessandro Casagni, who also handles production, “Miss Italy” leans firmly into dancefloor rhythms, all four-on-the-floor kicks, layered vocals and choruses, yet never loses itself in hedonism for its own sake. If anything, the whole record plays like a statement of intent, starting with the opening electropop of “Sì lo so”, where she calls herself out in her own way (“Yes I know, I'm a liar/ A bitch, but it's none of your business”), through the driving “Tropicana Hotline”, which pillories contemporary gossip culture with a biting approach reminiscent of Mara Redeghieri's “Memobox” (Ustmamò), all the way to the disarming nursery-rhyme cadence of “Bibidi bobidi bu”, in which Margherita, with her theatrical crooning, revisits the moment she had to redefine her own path, clashing with the music business to avoid being crushed between pop ambitions and alternative instincts: “I'd like to make pop, avoid the flop/ And yet I always see myself stuck on the sidelines”.

Easing the tension is “Hollywood”, the album's only ballad, released as the second single and built entirely around piano, voice and strings, with a suspended, Lana Del Rey-esque flow that's broken up by bursts of trip-hop beats and a tighter, near-rap cadence, with clear nods to certain productions from the Nineties. The lyrics, meanwhile, tell of a toxic love that pushes her to erase her own personality to the point where even recognising herself becomes difficult.

And while more introspective tracks like “Prima o poi” and “Io” take on a more intimate tone, caught between accepting change and trying to pick up the pieces after a fall (“I've got no nails left to dig my own grave/ I'm done going in circles, I'm sick/ of hitting rock bottom/ I'm broken and slowly I'm putting myself back together”), “Le brave ragazze” — the theme song for the film “Notte prima degli esami 3.0”, in which Ditonellapiaga made her acting debut — takes us back to 2010s dance sounds in an attempt to chase the (lost) carefree spirit of adolescence.

“La verità” closes the record on a note of four-on-the-floor beats and a club aesthetic reminiscent of Myss Keta — carefree only on the surface, with a latent melancholy that finds its only outlet on the dancefloor, punctuated by the mantra-like refrain: “Don't stop crying babe (e non c'è modo di evitarla)/ Always feeling incompresi”.

Perhaps she could have dared even more, but “Miss Italy” marks a significant step forward for Ditonellapiaga, one that lets us hope for an even brighter future and gives us back a rediscovered protagonist of Italian pop music.

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13/04/2026