Marco Mengoni

From Ronciglione to a television final

Marco Mengoni was born on 25 December 1988 in Ronciglione, a town in the province of Viterbo, and reached the public through television rather than through a club circuit. In 2009 he won the third season of X Factor Italia, and the records that followed tracked a singer working out what kind of pop act he wanted to be: Solo 2.0 in 2011, then #prontoacorrere in 2013.

Two albums arrived in 2015 alone, Parole in circolo and Le cose che non ho, followed by Atlantico in 2018. Across that stretch he was named Best European Act at the MTV Europe Music Awards twice, in 2010 and again in 2015, and his Italian sales passed 2.8 million records. The voice — a big, slightly grainy pop-soul instrument that sits lower than most Italian male singers of his generation — was the constant; the production around it kept changing.

Two Sanremo wins, ten years apart

The two pivots in his career are both Sanremo wins, and they bracket a decade. In 2013 he took the festival with "L'essenziale" and went on to Eurovision in Malmö, finishing seventh with 126 points. In 2023 he won again with "Due vite", and at Eurovision in Liverpool placed fourth with 350 points — a far stronger showing, and the one that gave him a European audience rather than a purely Italian one.

Between those two wins sits the work he is most likely to be remembered for: the Materia trilogy, three linked albums released across three years — Materia (Terra) in 2021, Materia (Pelle) in 2022 and Materia (Prisma) in 2023. The trilogy was built as a single argument spread over three records, and "Due vite" came out of its final instalment. The stadium tour that followed closed on 15 July 2023, and he then went quiet on new albums for three years.

The loss behind the new record

Mengoni's mother, Nadia Ferrari, died in September 2024 after a long illness, and the song that reopened his release schedule comes directly from that. "Giornate perse" was issued on 9 October 2026 through Epic Records Italy and Sony Music Italy, co-written by Mengoni with Jacopo Ettorre, with music credited to Giovanni Pallotti, Vanegas and Edwyn Roberts. It carries a nod to Lucio Dalla, a reference point he has never been shy about.

Presenting it on the season-opening episode of Che tempo che fa on Nove, he described the track as coming from the most difficult period of his life, from the hardest loss and the darkest separation. He said it was a song that came out instinctively but was heavy to make, and that the vocal on the record is the first and only take — after cutting it, he did not sing it again.

That single leads an album called Felice sì, ma tutto sbagliato, due on 11 December 2026 and his eleventh, arriving three years after Materia (Prisma). In an interview published on 24 October 2026 he framed the record as the start of a phase in which he grants himself the right to get things wrong, which is also where the title and the name of the Milan residency come from.

What 2025 proved about the live operation

The scale of his touring is no longer in question. Marco negli Stadi 2025, produced and organised by Live Nation and marketed around fifteen years of his career, ran eleven Italian stadium shows between 21 June and 24 July 2025: a warm-up date at Lignano Sabbiadoro, then Naples' Stadio Diego Armando Maradona on 26 June, Rome's Stadio Olimpico on 2 July, two nights at Bologna's Dall'Ara on 5 and 6 July, Turin on 9 July, two at San Siro in Milan on 13 and 14 July, Padua on 17 July, Bari's San Nicola on 20 July and two closing nights in Messina on 23 and 24 July. Naples, Bari, the first Bologna date, the first Milan date and the second Messina date sold out, and by the autumn the run was reported at more than 500,000 tickets.

The production was not a conventional hits set. A review of the sold-out San Siro night on 13 July 2025 described a two-and-a-half-hour show structured like a Greek tragedy, with a prologue, choral passages, episodes and a catharsis, staged among large ruins and transparent crystal forms, and a 26-metre moving walkway taking him out into the field. The core band was padded out with strings, saxophone, brass and backing vocalists, and guests including Frah Quintale, Joan Thiele, Sayf and Rkomi came on across the night. The reviewer called the singing flawless and noted an audience weighted heavily towards women attending in pairs and groups.

He then took the same theatrical instinct indoors. Five Italian arena dates were added in autumn 2025 — Milan's Unipol Forum on 12 October, Pesaro on 21 October, Bologna's Unipol Arena on 24 October, Florence's Mandela Forum on 29 October and Rome's Palazzo dello Sport in November — before Live in Europe 2025 took him from Geneva on 19 November to Madrid on 10 December, with stops including Paris's Salle Pleyel on 3 December and the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London on 7 December. A review of the Rome arena show described a set of around 26 songs divided into six chapters, with costume changes marking cycles of collapse and rebuilding, a thirteen-piece band and six performers.

Allo Sbagliato: the residency that undoes all of that

What is on sale now is the deliberate inverse of a stadium tour. Allo Sbagliato is an offline club under Mengoni's creative direction, running 26 nights at the Teatro Principe in Milan from 5 November to 19 December 2026. Smartphones are placed in closable pouches on entry. There is no raised stage and no barrier; the audience is arranged around the performance area.

The musical rules are just as specific. Eleven musicians, no click track, no backing sequences and no in-ear monitors, with the sound leaning on soul and blues rather than the orchestral pop of the stadium show. There is no fixed setlist: each evening is assembled in the room from repertoire and covers, so no two nights match. The programme is not only his own music — the venue is also hosting comedy, visual art and theatre, guests including Anna, Vulkan, Primogenito and Benjamin Clementine, and a Federico Buffa reading on Lucio Dalla titled "Il futuro è tra mezz'ora".

Because the first night falls on 5 November 2026, there are no reviews of the format yet, and the usual signals — how long a night runs, how much of the new album gets played before its 11 December release — will only become clear once the run is underway. What is already clear is the trade: a singer who sold half a million stadium tickets in a single summer has chosen to spend the end of 2026 in a theatre with the cameras switched off.