 main index © Jeff Matthews 2002-2012
Together with Salvatore di Giacomo and Ferdinando Russo, Rocco Galdieri is considered one of those poets who helped revitalize Neapolitan dialect poetry and theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He wrote the lyrics of a number of Neapolitan Songs, almost none of which are in the light-hearted tradition of more famous songs such as Funiculì-Funiculà or the sugar-coated Come Back to Sorrento. His forte—if one can use that word—was despair, unrequited love, and loneliness. He was also a prolific writer of sketches
and is often called the “father of the rivista”
(vaudeville, approximately) in Italy. He
collaborated with Eduardo
Scarpetta, with whom he wrote the play Babilonia for the 1912-13 season in
Naples, a play which later provided the great Eduardo de Filippo with his
first stage role. Galdieri was obsessed with the
fear of an early death, which prophecy
self-fulfilled itself at the age of 49. His son, Michele
Galdieri (1902-1965), was known as
playwright, film
scriptwriter and lyricist. He was active between the
years 1925-65 and worked with and wrote for some of
the great names in Italian theater and cinema,
including the De Filippo
family, Totò, and Anna
Magnani. Like his father, he wrote many rivista
sketches. He was the author of one of the best-known
Neapolitan Songs of the post-war period, "Munasterio 'e Santa Chiara" (1945)
(to music by Alberto Barberis). He also wrote the
original Italian lyrics to Non
Dimenticar (music by Gino Redi), the
best-known English version of which (with lyrics by
Shelley Dobbins) was recorded by Nat King Cole in
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