Dalida - The Beloved European Singer’s Calabrian Roots
Although she became famous worldwide as Dalida, she was born Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti in Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt, on 17 January 1933.
What is Dalida's Calabrian connection? Her father Pietro Gigliotti (1904–1945) and mother Filomena Giuseppina (née d’Alba; 1904–1971) were born in Serrastretta, Calabria, in Italy. Pietro studied music in school and played violin in taverns; Giuseppina was a seamstress.
Dalida was born in Egypt after her parents settled there, a move they made so that her father could pursue his career as a concert violinist.
By birth, Dalida automatically gained Italian nationality through jus sanguinis of both Italian parents.
Dalida singing the traditional Calabrian song "Calabrisella mia" (translation: "My sweet Calabrian girl") with actor John Dorelly on Italian national television:
She and her parents have maintained a strong bond with their roots over time, not only emotional, but also cultural and bureaucratic.
Dalida, in fact, even after moving to France, maintained her Italian citizenship and became French, with dual citizenship, only with her marriage to Lucien Morisse in 1961.
Dalida's visit to that small mountain town in Calabria, where her parents were born, Serrastretta, was unforgettable.
The singer decided to include an extra charity concert date in Catanzaro in her Italian tour, precisely to travel for the first time to the town that was the birthplace of her loved ones. Here she visited the house where her parents lived before moving to Egypt:
And she also met her cousins and her great-aunt who was still alive, played the tambourine and embraces the football team that bears his name.
The much idolized Dalida, the first woman to win the Platinum Record and for whom the Diamond Record was created, took to the stage of the Municipal Theatre of Serrastretta. All the newspapers talked about it. And at the moment of her departure from Sant'Eufemia station (modern Lamezia Terme), the tears flowed freely, so much so that a few days before the end of the tour, Dalida wrote to the mayor.
A shot that immortalizes Dalida's visit to the mountain village of Serrastretta, photographed next to the then mayor, Menotti Mancuso (1962)
«I would like to express to you again all the joy I felt in getting to know my family's town - wrote Dalida following a visit to Serrastretta in the 1960s -, and thank you for the warm and enthusiastic welcome you gave me. I will never forget the emotion I felt in finding myself among all of you and I ask you to pass on, both to my cousins and to all the inhabitants of Serrastretta, the thanks that come from the bottom of my heart."
Dalida in Calabria in 1962, photographed by Ezio Arcuri, upon arrival at the Sant'Eufemia Lamezia station (reportage archive)
Dalida spent her early years in Egypt’s bustling Italian Egyptian community but she lived most of her adult life in France.
Beloved singer both in Italy and France, unforgettable queen of the Paris Olympia, during her career she sold over 170 million albums all over the world, also earning the first diamond record in history in 1981, created specifically for her.
Away from the spotlight, however, many great sorrows accompanied his life, which was interrupted - at the age of 54 - on 3 May 1987 by an overdose of barbiturates. «La vie m'est unbearable. Pardonnez moi/Forgive me, life is unbearable for me" wrote Dalida in her farewell note, found on the bedside table of her bedroom, in the villa at number 11 bis Rue d'Orchampt in Montmartre.
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