Mannarino

San Basilio, then the bars of Monti

Alessandro Mannarino was born in Rome on 23 August 1979 and grew up in San Basilio, on the city's north-eastern edge. He started performing in 2001 in the Monti district, in hybrid sets that put DJ work next to acoustic songs — a format that already suggested someone unwilling to pick a lane between the Roman cantautore tradition and whatever rhythm was passing through the room.

In 2006 he assembled Kampina, a six-piece band, and the arrangement stuck: for the two decades since, the music has been written around a group rather than around a man with a guitar. That mattered later, when the records began leaning on percussion sections heavy enough to carry a field full of people.

The Romanesco dialect has been constant from the beginning. It is not decoration on top of the songs; it is the grain of them, and it is the reason a sizeable part of the catalogue reads as street theatre rather than confession.

Six albums, and a slow climb up the chart

Bar della rabbia arrived on 20 March 2009 on Leave Music/Universal. It peaked at number 87 in Italy but kept selling until it was certified platinum, won the Premio Giorgio Gaber, reached the Targa Tenco shortlist and put him on the Concerto del Primo Maggio stage in Rome for the first time. Supersantos followed on 15 March 2011, reaching number 17 and going gold; its track Vivere la vita was made with the artist Valerio Berruti.

Al monte, released on 13 May 2014 and trailed by the single Gli animali on 11 April, got to number 3 and also went gold. Apriti cielo, on 13 January 2017, finally took the top of the Italian album chart and was certified platinum, with the title track climbing Spotify's Viral 50. A concert document, Apriti cielo Live, came on 20 October 2017 and reached number 16.

V, released on 17 September 2021, peaked at number 2. Mannarino produced it with Iacopo Sinigaglia, with additional production from figures including Joey Waronker, and recorded it across New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Rome — the first clear sign that the geography of the records was going to widen.

Alongside the music there is a modest acting line: the film Tutto l'amore del mondo in 2010, an episode of Boris the same year, and Viva l'Italia in 2012. The awards shelf holds SIAE's best young Italian composer prize from 13 July 2012, an Amnesty International Italia award in 2015 for the song Scendi giù, the Premio De André on 25 November 2017 and the Premio Gabriella Ferri in October 2019.

Primo amore and the five-year gap

The sixth studio album, Primo amore, was released on 8 May 2026 through BMG, five years after V. It runs 40 minutes and 54 seconds across nine tracks: Ciao, Dammi, Maradona, Per un po' d'amore, Carne, Venere, Kalanera, Bambino and the title song. The lead single, Ciao, had come out on 23 March 2026.

Francesco Fugazza handled production and artistic direction, with sessions in Rome, Milan and Brooklyn. The Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco — a long-standing collaborator of David Byrne, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Atoms for Peace — is the other decisive presence. Drums and hand percussion sit at the front of the mix, with synthesisers and programming filling the space where accordion and brass used to live. Reggae and dub shapes run under several tracks.

The gap was not idle. Reviewers trace the record to extended travel through Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, and to roughly two months spent in Panama. Announcing the album, Mannarino said he had been far away and had needed to lose himself to get there, bringing back "tutto l'amore che ho trovato dall'altra parte del cielo" — love he had found on the other side of the sky, and which had always been inside him.

Critical response was warm rather than unanimous. Buscadero gave it three stars out of five, describing hypnotic rhythms in which guitar talks to synthesiser across a spiritual, psychedelic setting, and drawing a line to Manu Chao's tropical arrangements. The same writer singled out Bambino, Maradona and the title track.

Standing, autumn 2026

The Per un po' d'amore tour ran from June to early October 2026, produced by Vivo Concerti with Concerto Music and VignaPR, and routed largely through Italian festivals and open-air arenas: Fermo, Padua, Florence, Rome, Naples, Pisa, Genoa, Como, Tarvisio, Assisi, Santa Sofia, Locorotondo, Alghero, Roccella Ionica, Pescara, Mantua, Catania. The main run closed on 11 September at the Parco della Musica in Milan, with a final date on 4 October at Musicastelle in Antey-Saint-André. Across the Italian dates the tour sold more than 60,000 tickets.

On 9 September 2026 a European tour was announced, with tickets going on sale through TicketOne at 11am the following day. Ten dates open at the Volkhaus in Zurich on 27 February 2027, then take in Sala Apolo in Barcelona on 1 March, Valencia, Málaga, Sala Changó in Madrid, La Machine du Moulin Rouge in Paris on 7 March, La Madeleine in Brussels, the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on 9 March, Melkweg in Amsterdam on 11 March and SO36 in Berlin on 12 March. The London and Berlin rooms are club-scale, which tells its own story: a number-one artist at home still playing to a diaspora audience abroad.

The Santa Sofia show on 2 August 2026 drew close to 5,000 people and was framed by reviewers as a return after three years away from Italian summer stages.

The band and the room

The touring group is consistent across the 2026 reviews: Alessandro Chimenti on guitar, Matteo Pezzolet on bass, Francesco Santalucia on keyboards and percussion, Cesare Petulicchio on drums, Lavinia Mancusi on violin and mandolin, and Simona Sciacca on synth and flutes. Writers covering Genoa described the band as precise and never intrusive — a useful quality in a set built on dynamics rather than volume.

Two moments from the summer stand out in the coverage. At Masseria Ferragnano in Locorotondo on 9 August the grounds also carried a sound installation by Andrea Laszlo De Simone, Una lunghissima ombra, and Mannarino raised a Palestinian flag during the performance. At the Ippodromo delle Capannelle in Rome on 10 July, part of Rock in Roma, the critic Gabriella Vaghini called the night a collective ritual rather than a concert.

That phrase recurs often enough across Italian reviews to be worth noting as a pattern rather than a one-off compliment: the shows are repeatedly written up as shared rites in which the crowd finishes the work.