La canzone di Marinella

De Andre wrote and composed "La canzone di Marinella" in 1963, and Gian Piero Reverberi arranged the original, a slow bolero released in 1964 on a Karim single with "Valzer per un amore". It did not sell well. In 1969 he told L'Europeo it was rhetorically loaded and that financial needs shaped his choices, and told another interviewer that the bella and stella rhymes probably made it more successful than his other songs; in 1997 he told Vincenzo Mollica it sounds like a Neapolitan song written by a Genoese. Of its subject he said in 1993 that it was a crime story about a country girl near Asti, orphaned at sixteen, cast out, driven to prostitution and thrown in a river, whose death he wanted to change, and in 1997 that he read it at fifteen in a provincial newspaper and wanted to reinvent her life and soften her end. A likely real case, according to Roberto Argenta's 2012 book, is Maria Boccuzzi, whose death was reported in the Gazzetta del Popolo on January 29, 1953 and which is unsolved; a lyric-analysis site names a different river, uncited.

Mina recorded it for Dedicato a mio padre in December 1967, arranged by Augusto Martelli, performed it on the television show Canzonissima, and released it as a 45 with "I discorsi" on February 1, 1968, which brought De Andre national fame. Rolling Stone Italia calls it the song that changed his career, and a 1997 compilation note says that without Mina he would likely have become a lawyer; he thanked her for stacking the cards in his favor. He and Mina recorded a duet in 1997 for the compilation Mi innamoravo di tutto, issued as a single and later on Mina's In duo (2003), and reissued in 2017 as a 3,000-copy orange vinyl 45. The song was part of the 1978 and 1979 tour with PFM, who built a version with solos.

Covers include Gianni Morandi (1971), Dori Ghezzi (1984), Joan Baez (a TV show on May 15, 1984), Renato Zero (2000), Massimo Ranieri (2006), Cristiano De Andre (2009), Gianna Nannini (2014, on Hitalia), and La Municipal (2019, on Faber nostrum). Which version our upload is has not been established.