The Winter of 2024 saw the opening rounds of Sanremo Giovani, the Newcomers’ selection of Il Festival della Canzone Italiana. Four performers are left—Alex Wyse, Settembre, Maria Tomba, and Vale LP & Lil Jolie—an will face each other one last time during February’s Sanremo Campioni (the Big Artists) live shows.
But what happened that led us to these names, and what can that tell us about Sanremo Artistic Director Carlo Conti and his choices for the main show? After all, Conti was one of the jurors of the Newcomers’ section.
What Were The Italian Juries Looking For? Two criteria jumped out watching the Giovani rounds: how “on trend” a song was and how mellow it was. Those two factors were make-or-breakers for the jurors. With Giovani a 100 percent jury vote, impressing the jury was the only way to score.
Let’s take a look at how the selection played out and what that tells us about the jury’s thinking.
The Sanremo Giovani Elimination Duels
During the first rounds of Sanremo Giovani, we can see almost nothing of note, having the jury sift through a wide selection of artists. With no shade or critique for the eliminated ones, I can safely say that here the criteria was: stronger acts over weaker acts; by weaker I refer to acts that needed further refining and polishing and performers that needed to develop more artistic maturity before hitting the Sanremo stage, even if the quality was there
Two performances stand out: Grelmos and Questo e Quello.
Grelmos is someone I’ll actually critique. She is (according to her own words uttered on stage) an influencer turned rapper on her manager’s advice, and selected because of a proposal received by her producer. Her song or performance has no flair, just an image that appeals to chronically online insta baddies.
However, this points to one of the juror criteria mentioned above. Trends, for the jurors, are not simply important, they’re pivotal.
But, at least in this phase, this approach can be thrown out the window when something refreshing enough gets into the picture.
It’s the case of Questo e Quello, which is opposite to the other one: Francesco Mannella and Stefano D’Angelo are seasoned performers despite their young age, and ‘Bella Balla’, packed with an orchestral punch heavy on the brass section, feels like dancing in the streets of an Italian town on a summer night. It doesn’t sound like anything topping the charts here right now, the performance’s concept is raw and, according to the jurors, messy, but the song calls to a desire to party that spans beyond music trends.
There’s a third duel worth highlighting, Angelica Bove against Sea John. Here, we have two performers of the same artistic maturity whose entries needed no further polishing. Still, the jurors told Sea John that despite outshining his opponent’s vocal abilities, his act was “too curated” in an opposite fashion to Questo e Quello’s.
Still, the truth is that the youth resonates far more with the image of a melancholic and tormented songstress like Angelica rather than an ethereal and experimental artist like Giovanni. Once again, trends were a determining factor.
We now have a small yet clear snapshot of this selection’s dynamics. The semifinal head-to-head duels are where we can see them in their full picture.
The Sanremo Giovani Semi Finals
Let’s start with Grelmos vs Settembre. The first one has improved her performance, but that alone can’t make a wannabe Anna Pepe outstanding (being on trend is one thing; becoming just one of the copycats is another). Of course, it loses to Settembre’s emotional ballad, but it’s worth noting that Gremlos’ ‘Flashback’ was, among the two, the more upbeat entry.
Arianna Rozzo vs Vale LP & Lil Jolie is crucial for understanding how the jurors reason.
Arianna serves a super breezy and danceable bop about being proud of hailing from Naples, and it sounds very much on trend (given how us Southerners are vocal about our heritage, just think Geolier last year). But it’s not nearly as on-trend as two queer-coded indie girls singing about sex on a just ever so slightly upbeat, stripped-down instrumental. Their act is the photograph of a generation. And this is why ‘J’Adore’, despite being much more powerful and engaging than ‘Dimmi Quando Sei Pronto Per Fare L’Amore,’ lost the battle.
Extremely telling is the comment juror Ema Stockholma made before voting: “These are two hits, one [Vale and Jolie’s] seems more curated, the other [Arianna’s] seems more unintentional, like a bomb that blew up (in your hands)”.
This could imply that, according to her, Arianna didn’t focus as much as Vale and Jolie on how much her song would’ve appealed to the public. In a way she did: Arianna wrote a song because she was naturally inspired to and because it appealed to people like her (to literally her people), Vale and Jolie specifically targeted the much wider queer audience, and made it intentionally the main focus of their entry, prioritizing it over vocal performance and richness of the instrumental.
Now we’re onto what was probably The Battle Of The Giovani Titans: Tancredi vs Alex Wyse. Both of them are on an ascending path, both of them are pretty well-known already, both of them showed up with bangers. But the mellow, intense and moving ‘Rockstar’ comes out on top.
Tancredi’s ‘Standing Ovation’ had all the characteristics of a Sanremo entry from the Amadeus era: colourful, stylish, a little bratty. Tancredi is a double platinum artist, and his participation to the Festival was (and is) considered a fated event. So why didn’t he make it on his first try? I guess that he lost to a ballad, and a very strong one as well, and this jury clearly has a soft spot for those.
The duel between Mew and Questo e Quello probably sums up the Sanremo Giovani jurors nicely.
Mew is already kind of well-known, ‘Oh My God’ is quite upbeat, but it has a gloomy atmosphere and talks about depression, her act is polished, and she fits the mould too much not to win. Juror Daniele Battaglia tells Questo e Quello, before the final verdict, a line that’s emblematic, to say the least:” If this world (the Italian music industry) worked the other way around, you two would’ve won the festival already”.
We see the songs with the most whimsy, Mazzariello’s ‘Amarsi Per Lavoro’ and Bosnia’s ‘Vengo Dal Sud’, both lose their head-to-heads to songs that are more traditional in arrangement and presentation.
It’s worth noting that Selmi has an extremely old-school approach (the jurors told him his song looks “fit for the Sanremo stage” and indeed ‘Forse Per Sempre’ reminds me of Gianluca Grignani and Fabrizio Moro in their prime), whilst Bosnia’s ‘Vengo Dal Sud’ is made for the clubs of our time. However, it wasn’t a ballad, and according to the jurors ,his production style is way too similar to Salmo’s
The Sanremo Giovanni Final
There’s actually not much to say about December’s Giovani Final (Effectively the Quarter Finals of the overall Contest). Most of the songs are ballads, and the two upbeat numbers end up battling each other. Between two topics dear to the hearts of Gen-Z (mental health and queerness), the latter has the upper hand and so Mew loses to Vale LP and Lil Jolie.
The remaining acts all carry the same vibe, although not all are in the same musical category. The exception being the two songs selected via Area Sanremo and not through RAI; the flirty Maria Tomba and the energetic Etra, who make up the final Dduel of the final. Tomba seems ready to join the wide roster of empowering Italian pop girlies who are confident in their own skin, and this is probably what grants her the win.
In this final batch of songs, ‘Goodbye (voglio good vibes)’ looks like a wildcard, an odd-ball chosen to break a streak of mellow songs that would’ve seemed too flat and a little diverse without it.
And this is where we are now.
Sanremo Giovani And Sanremo Campioni
While we won’t hear 2025’s Sanremo songs from the Big Artists until Tuesday night, we know that we have a playlist that blends well with existing musical trends, and speaks to the heart of ballad lovers… or at least to those who prefer lightly tapping their foot to the beat rather than dancing.
At least two-thirds of the songs chosen for Thursday’s Duets Night are ballads or have a calm-to-sombre vibe. Several artists have hinted at intense topics for their original songs; Fedez will sing about depression, Brunori Sas about his relationship with parenthood, and Simone Cristicchi about how caretaking roles reverse when our parents age, I feel safe to say we’re in for the most serious Sanremo edition in recent years.
The songs have surely been chosen with a keen eye on the audience, especially the young demographic. Yet older generations tend to shy away from bops, and if the same reasonings that have been applied to Sanremo Giovani are at work here as well, I think this is the year lots of us will cry while watching the festival with our parents. After all, Artistic Director Carlo Conti said he wanted to put family first in this edition.
And finally, our four remaining Sanremo Giovani performers will also be taking to the stage this week. I think Vale LP and Lil Jolie are in for the win. Their song, co-written with Madame, is a flag of the queer generation, and its minimalistic composition fits the playlists of way too many listeners. It’s an extremely curated package by definition, and with everything I’ve seen so far, I think it will landslide.
You can tune in on RaiUno from February 12 at 20:40 CET to find out if I’m right! And don’t forget to follow Questo e Quello’s quest to the Eurovision Song Contest… they’re in the third Semi Final of Una Voce Per San Marino.