Talk:'O sole mio

In popular culture
I kind of think that it would be nice to mention the spot off of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective where Jim Carrey was talking to his co-worker, turned around in the opposite direction, bent over, grabbed his buttocks with both hands, and started singing "Ass-hole-a-Meooo"
 * I agree. Go ahead and add it.  Don't forget the "ooohhhhhh Sodomy-ahhhhhhhh" part.Rockypedia (talk) 19:51, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

How are the lyrics notable?
Keep in mind this is an encyclopedia, if people wanted lyrics they'd use Google. This article also has very much bias in plain sight, I suggest we delete it or add sources proving the opinions are popular among critics. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.219.25.140 (talk) 15:31, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Article name
The fact that the Neapolitan name has an apostrophe in front of it is irrelevant for the English Wikipedia, in WP:ENGLISH the WP:COMMONNAME is O Sole Mio, therefore that's what the article should be called. In fact, in the UK, the WP:COMMNONAME is "the Cornetto song", but I won't push it that far.... :-)) FlagSteward (talk) 17:15, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

It's Now or Never
So why is there a separate article for There's No Tomorrow, but not for "It's Now or Never". With new lyrics and a borrowed melody, it is not a cover version, and its notability on its own could warrant its own article. --Wolfer68 (talk) 00:07, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

"O" in "'O sole mio"
"O" stay for "Lo", a determinative article: thus correct translation from neapolitan to italian is "Lo sole mio". In modern standard italian the correct determinative article for the word sun is "Il": "Il sole mio", but when song was writed italian was a little different. The ancient use of "Lo sole" is yet in Dante p. e. http://books.google.it/books?id=3dY5a7SmZdwC&pg=PA81&lpg=PA81&dq=%22lo+sole%22&source=bl&ots=h6Xzhjr6aR&sig=QL3AcJD3cTBXOzwLrNrs1GymlJ4&hl=it&ei=nG1vS6eALYPWmwPmg9zJBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CCsQ6AEwCDgK#v=onepage&q=%22lo%20sole%22&f=false "Onde vedemo lo sole che, discendendo lo raggio suo qua giù" eccetera. FYI. Excuses for my bad english. Greetings from Italy. --93.65.61.136 (talk) 01:54, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Just One Cornetto
The English travesty, which in my opinion is very good, is sung by a Venetian gondolier BECAUSE Venice is many miles from Naples. Pamour (talk) 19:59, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

"Recorded by"
What is the point of listing a handful of singers under "recorded by"? There are dozens, probably hundreds of singers who recorded it. The current list does not include Caruso, but includes Elvis, which seems strange. --188.23.78.187 (talk) 11:55, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Reliable source
The text's many errors need to be fixed according to http://ac-support.europe.umuc.edu/~jmatthew/naples/napsongtexts.html#%27%20sole%20mio --Espoo (talk) 01:01, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

Copyright section
I deleted the "Copyright" section. The sourcing is dubious: one is apparently just a scan of a clipping from an unknown publication with unknown authorship. The other two can't agree on what year the supposed Italian court case took place (One said 2002, the other 2004). Both sources are apparently blogs that haven't been updated in a decade. When I search Google for this it looks more like urban legend than fact. Additionally, even if the story is real it's not accurate to say the song is copyrighted until 2042 if it was composed in 1898. It might be under copyright in the EU if the story about the court case is true, but it most certainly is not in the United States or Canada. And third, if it's copyrighted then this article violates that copyright by having the lyrics. Janus303 (talk) 04:24, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I concur. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:05, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I have restored this section. The decision of the judge was big news in Italy at the time, and was reported in at least three of Italy's best respected daily newspapers, La Repubblica, La Stampa, and Corriere della Sera, and what appears to me to be a well-respected monthly music magazine, Amadeus.
 * I can confirm from personal experience that the Australasian Performing Right Association considers the song to be still under copyright in Australia. When a choir of which I am a member issued a CD in 2010, 'O sole mio was one of the songs for which we had to pay royalties.
 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 17:02, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
 * P.S.: It is my understanding (which could well be mistaken) that the copyright in the lyrics of a musical work is separate from those in both the melody and the arrangement. As far as I can tell from the reports of the legal decision, Mazzuchi's contribution to the composition was to the music alone.  Since the lyricist, Giovanni Capurro, died in 1920, the lyrics are now in the public domain just about everywhere, and there should be no problems with their being included in the article.
 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 18:32, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

Reorganisation of notes and references

 * I have now requested the pages in my user space illustrating various aspects of this proposal be speedily deleted. Once this has been done, the links to those pages will no longer work.


 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 08:40, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

I wish to add several separate citations to different pages of Paquito Del Bosco's Book ’O S M — Storia della più famosa canzone del mondo to the article. This becomes somewhat cumbersome to do when there is just a single section devoted to both footnotes and references all jumbled up together. I am therefore proposing to separate the references out into a separate section, as illustrated in this draft revision of the article. Since this will be a non-trivial change to the article's format, I'm foreshadowing it here, in case there are any serious objections. David Wilson (talk · cont) 11:44, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
 * There's nothing wrong with shortened footnotes, but I recommend you familiarise yourself with Help:Shortened footnotes, WP:CIT, Template:Harvard citation documentation, Template:Sfn, & similar. The implementation in your sandbox makes it very difficult for subsequent editors. I'm also worried that your version discards several sources in favour of Del Bosco; a variety of sources is always preferable. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:39, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I will reply to your comment about the discarding of sources separately. Here, I will limit myself to the isssue of reorganising the presentation of references and footnotes.  Having now browsed through your recommended reading, I'm a little puzzled about the lessons I'm supposed to have drawn from it.  I was already aware that the shortened footnote and Harvard citation templates existed, and also roughly aware of their capabilities.  Most of the time, I simply choose not to use them, for reasons which I hope will become apparent from my subsequent comments, and your suggested reading has not changed my mind about the relative advantages and disadvantages of using them.   Nevertheless, if these templates can be used to implement a reasonable reorganisation that meets with your approval, I would be happy for that to be done.
 * If, for some reason, I were forced to use these templates to implement the reorganisation, the article would look pretty much the same to its readers as the draft revision I have already pointed to.  Here is a version of the revision in which  I have systematically used the  template to construct the footnotes with shortened citations.  If you compare the two versions of the revision, you will find that the article bodies, and the references sections are identical, and the only difference between the notes sections (apart from the duplication of footnote 9 by footnote 10 in the second version) lies in the formatting of the Harvard style citations.  The formatting I prefer for these when used in a footnote to support a statement made in the body of the article is illustrated in footnote 9 of the first version of my revision. While this formatting style is very similar to that produced by the  template, the text marking the link to the cited source which that template produces includes the author's name, the year, and the opening parenthesis that precedes it, whereas I normally prefer to have it marked by the year alone.  The format produced by the sfnm template, on the other hand—which I find rather less pleasing—is essentially the same as that produced by the  template.
 * While I was preparing the second version of my article revision I received a rude reminder of another reason why I prefer not to use the short footnote templates—namely, they appear to be less robust, and they are certainly less flexible, than tag pairs. If you click on the link to footnote 10 in the body of my second revision—produced using tag pairs—you will find it takes you to that footnote, just as it's supposed to.  If you do the same on the the supposed link to footnote 9, however,—produced using the  template—you will find that nothing happens.  After spending several frustrating hours on and off trying to track down what I thought would have turned out to be some subtle error of mine in the formatting of the template call, I eventually discovered that it was actually a bug in the template itself Wiki software that creates the links and anchors between the footnote and its invocation. . A double underscore in an external link included in one of the citations bizarrely prevents the template from creating the necessary anchors for the links to the footnote and back to the text location of the reference referral.
 * To some extent I agree with your point about the reorganisation making it difficult for subsequent editors, but I doubt if that can be avoided merely by basing the reorganisation on the use of shortened footnote and Harvard citation templates.
 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 12:49, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Correction: I was mistaken in my diagnosis of the problem above. The anchors do in fact get created, but their identifying names don't match those of their corresponding links.
 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 13:41, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, actually there is something wrong with shortened footnotes: they make WP:Reference Tooltips useless (you see "Smith 2000", but still have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find out what the source actually is, or to open it in another tab). With ordinary referencing as in the page at the moment, both those can be done without losing your place in the text. References to different page numbers in the same book are easily handled with Rp or indeed with r. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 15:03, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
 * If implemented with sfn or similar, reference tooltips work for me. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:24, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Using the sfn or similar template won't do anything to fix the problem Justlettersandnumbers is complaining about. His or her complaint isn't that reference tooltips won't work, but that the shortened citation that it will display is unsatisfactory for a reader who wants to see the full citation.  Personally, I don't think the problem is anywhere near as serious as Justlettersandnumbers apparently does, but it certainly is one of the disadvantages of using shortened footnotes.  My opinion is that those disadvantages are far outweighed by the disadvantages of not using them.
 * To illustrate the problem, consider footnote 14 of the current article. If you mouseover the link to that footnote in the body of the article, what you see with reference tooltips will be a box like the following:


 * containing full details of the cited reference. But if you mouseover the the link to the corresponding footnote 13 in the second of my proposed revisions, where I have used the  template, what you see with reference tooltips will be a box like the following:


 * containing only the shortened citation. If the full citation is not already visible on the page, and you want to look at it, you will have to take some further action to do so.  However, it is simply not true that you must either "scroll down to the bottom of the page", thereby losing your place in the text, or open the page in another tab to see the full source citation, as asserted by Justlettersandnumbers.  In the second of the above two boxes, the text "McCann 2017" marks a link to the full citation of the source in the References section.  If you click on that link, the browser will shift the full citation as close as it can to the top of its window, and highlight it in pale blue.  To get back to the place on the page where you came from, you simply now have to click on the browser's back button.  Thus, the disadvantage for the use reference tooltips caused by using shortened citations in footnotes is merely that seeing full citations and returning to your place in the article requires two mouse clicks that would otherwise be unnecessary.
 * Morever, reference tooltips are only available to logged in Wikipedia users (or to savvy IT experts who know how to set up their browsers to use them when not logged in). Thus, the vast majority of casual Wikipedia readers will be blissfully unaware of even the very existence of reference tooltips, let alone of any change to its behaviour induced by the use of shortened citations in footnotes.
 * There will however be a similar slight disadvantage suffered by such readers. Without reference tooltips, clicking on a link to a footnote will take you directly to the footnote.  If the footnote contains the full citation to a source, then you won't need to take any other action to see it.  But if the footnote contains only a short-form citation you will have to click on its link to the full citation to see the latter.  Thus, again, shortened citations in footnotes have the disadvantage that seeing full citations and returning to your place in the article requires two more mouse clicks than would otherwise be necessary.
 * I will have nothing whatever to do with introducing the or  templates into article space, since I thoroughly detest them.  The ugliness of

" … legitimate co-composer.[8][9][1]",
 * which currently appears in the Copyright section of the article is bad enough, but in a version of the revision which uses the template, this has to get replaced with something like the following abomination:

" … co-composer of the 18 songs.[1]:54–57, 115–18[10][11][2]".
 * If the problems with reference tooltips described above is seen as a deal breaker, then there is a way of implementing shortened citations in footnotes that nevertheless preserves the full functionality of reference tooltips, illustrated in this version of my proposed revision.  If you mouseover the link to footnote 14 in that version, what you see will be a box similar to the second of those above, but with a crucial difference. It now contains a second link to the full citation, marked by the superscript "[ref 12]":


 * If you mouseover that link, reference tooltips will pop up a second box, similar to the first one given above, which contains the full citation.
 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 07:52, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Links to references constructed like  are what I mean by "very difficult for subsequent editors". sfn can be used to make this much simpler. Random example: International Atomic Time, references 7–9, 11, 13, 15; or Aphrodite, references 4, 6 and many others. In other words, sfn plus harv in citation templates seems to make life much easier for the original editor, for readers, and for subsequent editors. I would oppose any use of that impenetrable refn syntax here, or anywhere else. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:17, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Second version

 * The second version of my proposed revisions contains no instances of the refn template or interpage wikilinks of the form, so is the system of referencing in that version acceptable to you?  If not, then I see no point in pursuing the matter and I will simply withdraw the proposal altogether.
 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 22:53, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
 * That version is indeed more in line with citation practice in Wikipedia. You may want to look at the first reference after "legitimate co-composer of the 18 songs." – clicking on its superscript, currently [9], doesn't do anything. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 08:08, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Please reread the third paragraph of the first of my replies above.
 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 09:41, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Sorry for not remembering that paragraph. Respect for finding the double-underline bug in sfnm. However, it seems you found a workaround using harvnb. Another (ugly) workaround would be to use &amp;#95; for one of the underscores.
 * I now noticed that many instances of sfnm repeat the same "online copy"; providing it once in the long citation seems enough. This would also avoid the double-underline problem. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:12, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

The "online copies" aren't the same. Each provides an external link to the online source just cited. This might be a litle clearer in this new version of my proposed revision, which uses a template sfnmtxt in place of sfnm. This also solves the problem created by the double underscore. The template sfnm produces a pair of   tags and bizarrely tries to create a humongous name for them by appending a concatenation of all its parameters to the text string "FOOTNOTE". I created the sfnmtxt template to eliminate that untirely unnecessary procedure, and to use the same format as harvtxt for the citations it produces. David Wilson (talk · cont) 12:53, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Supposed discarding of sources
Michael Bednarek wrote above:
 * "I'm also worried that your version discards several sources in favour of Del Bosco; a variety of sources is always preferable."

I'm a little puzzled by this remark. The current version of the article contains one citation of Del Bosco's book. In my originally proposed revision I had added seven more. In only two instances of those did I remove a citation of any other source.
 * First, I moved a link to the IMSLP page on  ’O Sole Mio from its place in the sources cited for Capurro's Neapolitan lyrics to the External links section of the article, to accompany a similar link to Art Song Central's page on the song, which was already there.  My reason for doing this was that, of the six scores available from the IMSLP page (not counting the four part scores of the version for clarinet quartet as being separate scores), only three included any of Capurro's Neapolitan lyrics, and only two of those included all of them.  I'm more than happy for any published scores containing all of Capurro's lyrics to be individually cited, and in the latest version of my proposed revision, both such scores at the IMSLP site, and the two scores at the Art Song Central site, are now cited.
 * Second, I removed a citation to the entry on di Capua at the AllMusic website, written by James Reel. That this source is not reliable has remained uncontested since I  more than a week ago.  I will acknowledge that the reason I then gave for considering it unreliable ("user generated content") is not valid. I was then under the impression—which I later realised is probably mistaken—that the contents of AllMusic was crowdsourced, in much the same way as Wikipedia.  Nevertheless, Reel cites no source for the factoid repeated by the article from his brief bio—namely, that ’O Sole Mio was played in place of the Italian National Anthem at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics—so we haven't the foggiest idea how many stages of Chinese whispers the factoid had been subjected to before it surfaced in Reels's piece, or, indeed, without any more credible source to verify it, whether or not it had been almost entirely fabricated by that process.

David Wilson (talk · cont) 07:10, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
 * There's one other source in the current version of the article which I have replaced in my proposed revision, but not with Del Bosco's book. This was an obituary of Renato Pagliari in The Times, which .  This obituary carried no byline, which I consider a defect (if minor) in newspaper articles cited in Wikipedia, so when I discovered that the same newspaper had published another article on Pagliari's death, just a few days earlier, under the byline of Sadie Gray, I decided to use that one in place of the first.

Proposal withdrawn
Given that there does not appear to be a consensus in favour of this proposal, I hereby withdraw it. I have now incorporated most of my other proposed revisions into the article, while preserving its current organisation of citations and references.

David Wilson (talk · cont) 02:06, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Attribution?
What is the source of the English translation of the lyrics in the page? If they are taken from a Public Domain source they need attribution; if they are taken from a non-free source they'll have to be removed. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:55, 29 January 2018 (UTC)


 * There's a third possibility, perfectly compatible with Wikipedia's policies on translation of foreign sources (outlined here and here), which requires neither attribution to a reliable external source nor removal of the translation—namely, that the translation is the work of the Wikipedia editors who contributed to it.
 * appears to be the one which first inserted some version of the English lyrics into the article, from an IP address in Columbia. The lyrics were later    and then  without the second verse.  A different, somewhat less adequate, translation of the second verse was inserted by . There have been various minor revisions of the translation since then,  was responsible for inserting the erroneous interpretation of "there is not" for "oi ne'".
 * Neither of the editors responsible for the bulk of the translation provided any source for their contributions, which therefore carry an implicit affirmation of being their own work. It may be naive, but in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that we're obliged to assume good faith and take those affirmations at face value.
 * One of those editors, IvanScrooge98, is a native Italian—but not Neapolitan—speaker with excellent English, even if it's still not quite adequate for him to be mistaken for a native speaker, and he's still actively editing. I have every reason to believe that the translation he gave for the second verse was all his own work, but if you have any doubts you can always ask him directly.
 * The only other freely usable, reasonably literal, English translation I'm aware of in any any half-way credible source is my own. Since it's published under the auspices of the Dante Alighieri Society of Canberra, that should be sufficient to qualify it as being from a reliable source.  I would be reluctant to suggest that it be used, however, for two reasons:
 * The translation currently in the article is quite adequate, in my opinion. Replacing it wholesale by my own would be unnecessarily disrespectful to the editors who have contributed to the current one;
 * I have observed that among those who see it as their job to defend Wikipedia from conflicts of interest there appear to be a few zealots who I think would likely see any such suggestion from me as belonging in that category. While there really isn't any such conflict, I haven't the least desire to engage in any arguments about it.


 * David Wilson (talk · cont) 07:21, 30 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Yes, that small work I did on the translation is mine, but if there is need for reliable sources I wouldn't mind if my edits were changed a bit. :) [[File:Italy.png]] イヴァン スクルージ 九十八 （会話）[[File:Italy.png]] 09:20, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Origin of "It's Now or Never"
Wikipedia has two contradictory accounts of when Elvis Presley requested English lyrics for the song, one saying he did so while still in Germany, the other saying he did it after his discharge. As he was already back in the U.S. before his discharge, both cannot be true.

A passage in this article says:

"… while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army, Elvis Presley heard the recording and put to tape a private version of the song. Upon his discharge, he requested that new lyrics be written especially for him …"

However, a passage in the article on "It's Now or Never" says:

"In the late 1950s, while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army, Presley heard Martin's recording. According to The New York Times, quoting from the 1986 book Behind The Hits, "he told the idea to his music publisher, Freddy Bienstock, who was visiting him in Germany …"

The article on "It's Now or Never" cites a source, while the version in the present article does not. Can anyone provide a citation for this version, or should it be changed to match that in the other article? GCL (talk) 17:05, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Translation of "sta nfronte a te"
changed the translation of "sta nfronte a te" from "dwells in your face" to "is in front of you". While the former translation is definitely somewhat non-literal, the latter is certainly quite wrong in the context of the song. The primary meaning of "fronte" is "forehead", but it can also mean "face" or "front". In the absence of any context, "nfronte a te" could mean any of "on your forehead", "in (or on) your face", or "in front of you". It is clear, however, from the first verse of the song and the opening line of the refrain—"Ma n'atu sole cchiù bello, oi ne',"—that something like the first two of these senses, rather than the third, is intended. This is recognised in every rendition of the song into other languages, I have ever see. An italian version of the song, penned by the author of the original Neapolitan lyrics, Giovanni Capurro, for instance, goes: The Swedish version included in the same score goes: The English versions in the scores cited in the article are the following: While these are obviously very far from literal translations, they nevertheless reflect the same sentiment—namely, that the singer's beloved is the source of a sunlight characterised as being more lovely than that from the sun in the sky.

While the precise wording of the translation used in the article is certainly worth discussing, there is no doubt that the translation "is in front of you" is simply wrong. I shall be changing it back to something closer to a proper interpretation.

David Wilson (talk · cont) 14:00, 31 March 2018 (UTC)