Per Sempre Sì

On What Endures When All Feels Precarious

“Saremo io e te per sempre / legati per la vita”

“We will be you and I, forever / bound for life”

— Sal Da Vinci, Per sempre sì, Sanremo 2026

Every February, somewhere between the chaos of the academic calendar and the gray of the northern Virginia winter, I become, briefly, what I always was in part: a child of the Adriatic coast, raised on stolen signals and forbidden frequencies, tuned to a world just across the water that was not supposed to reach us. The Festival di Sanremo has been my annual thread back to that formation. It was a ritual in our household, as it was in most households in southern Albania, though we would never have said so aloud. We watched in the way of people who know they are watching something that belongs to someone else, beauty across a prohibited sea.

This year, I watched from my living room in the United States, many thousands of miles and several decades removed from those blanket-covered windows in Vlorë. And when Sal Da Vinci finished singing Per sempre sì and the Ariston erupted, I found myself doing something I had not expected: I sang along and fought back memories and tears.

The Ritual and the Signal

Let me tell you about the piste. In Berat, in the years of my childhood, there was a plain on the river bank where, on summer evenings, the town would gather. Simply to be together, in the open air, in the hour after dinner, moving slowly and speaking of small things. Couples danced. Not always formally, not always well, but they danced. My parents among them. My sister and I would sit nearby, content with fried potatoes and the peculiar pleasure children have of watching adults be happy and do adult things. The music was sometimes live, always Albanian, always approved.

That tradition has since disappeared. This is not unusual. Modernity is efficient at dissolving the small choreographies of communal life, replacing them with private pleasures delivered to individual screens.

But Sanremo remained. Not unchanged, not immune to the spectacle economy, not always dignified. But remained. And every February it offers an occasion to ask what a people still reach for when they are given a stage, a microphone, and an audience of millions.

The Naples in the Song

Sal Da Vinci is Neapolitan by inheritance and New Yorker by birth, the son of Mario Da Vinci, who carried the canzone napoletana across the Atlantic the way emigrants carry: in their throat and in their memories. Naples has always been one of the great sources of the Italian lyrical tradition, the tradition that leaked through my uncle’s antenna and wove itself into the sensibility of an entire generation of southern Albanians hungry to experience the forbidden world.

The Neapolitan song is not subtle or ambiguous. It reaches for the absolute with an earnestness that northern European aesthetics perhaps may find embarrassing. Per sempre sì is structured as a marriage vow, a public and solemn declaration that begins in the ordinary and ascends toward the sacred:

È cominciato tutto quanto dal principio

Io che per te ero solo un uomo sconosciuto

Poi diventato un re dal cuore innamorato

Tu una regina ora vestita in bianco sposa

It all started from the very beginning / I who for you was only an unknown man / Then became a king with a heart in love / You a queen, now dressed in white as a bride

What the song understands, and what its Neapolitan tradition has always understood, is that love is not primarily a feeling. It is a project. It is the accumulation of ordinary days given shape by a shared commitment. Abbiamo sognato figli in una grande casa — we dreamed of children in a large house. The dream precedes the reality.

But there was no naivete about that reality:

Perché un amore non è amore per la vita

Se non ha affrontato la più ripida salita

Because a love is not love for life / if it has not faced the steepest climb

There is a theology of love embedded in these two lines, not of the romantic comedy or the advertising industry, but of endurance. The idea that difficulty is not the enemy of love but, in a very real sense, its proof and its deepening and its sharpening.

The song closes not in Italian but in Neapolitan: Accosì / sarrà pe sempe sì. Thus it will be, forever yes. The return to the mother tongue, the language before the formal language, is not merely a flourish; it is the one you use when you mean it most. Neapolitan produces songs. Songs that have outlasted every political arrangement that has attempted to govern the territory in which they were born.

I thought about my own mother tongue in that moment. About the Albanian word besa, that untranslatable thing that is promise and oath and honor and covenant all at once. In the myth of Konstandin and Doruntina, the brother rises from the dead to honor his besa. It is the most serious word in the language. It is what you say when you mean forever.

Sal Da Vinci sings in Italian and then in Neapolitan. I heard, underneath both, something older than either language: the stubbornness of the ordinary against the grandeur of history. The insistence that two people, one house, one dream of children, one hand on one chest, is sufficient.

A Song for a Frightened Season

I could not stop thinking about the moment in which this song won.

We are living through what I would cautiously call a season of diffuse anxiety. The sources of that anxiety are multiple: geopolitical instability, the acceleration of technologies whose consequences none of us fully understand, institutional fractures, economic uncertainty, the persistent sense that the ground underfoot is not quite solid. If you pay attention to the cultural atmosphere, you can feel it: in the irony that circulates as a defense mechanism; in the exhaustion that presents as cynicism; in the difficulty many report in naming what they want, as opposed to what they fear.

Against this backdrop, a Neapolitan singer stood on the stage at Sanremo and, with a full voice and no apparent irony, sang about wanting to marry someone, have children, build a house, argue and make love and grow old together. He placed his hand on his chest. He promised, before God, that it would be forever. And the audience voted. The first prize was his.

I do not think this was nostalgia, though it had nostalgia in it. I think it was hunger. A hunger for simplicity. No, not the false simplicity that refuses the complicated world. Rather, the simplicity that sits beneath all the complexity: the knowledge that we are here together, that the days matter, that the people we love are worth promising things to. Un semplice sì / l’eternità è dentro una parola. A simple yes. Eternity inside a word.

My Albanian formation gave me a particular skepticism about grand claims. We grew up understanding that systems that promised everything delivered, reliably, very little. We learned not to believe the largest words. But Sal Da Vinci is not offering a system or a promise of collective salvation. He is offering something far smaller and far harder: saremo io e te. We will be you and I. Not humanity, not history. Just two people.

A simple song as a counter-claim to the season of fear.

Back to Basics, Which Were Never Simple

I have been called, in various professional contexts, a person who thinks about large systems. Institutions, infrastructures, the governance of emerging technologies, the organizational dynamics of universities navigating an uncertain technological landscape.

But I am also the daughter of people who danced on a river bank in southern Albania in the years when dancing was one of those few care-free activities.

I am the granddaughter of a woman who found community in the long lines for bread and milk and butter, who understood scarcity as a condition of life rather than a failure of markets.

I am someone who learned the Italian language not from a classroom but from a blanket-covered window and the iridescent impossibility of Raffaella Carrà on a black-and-white screen.

Saying per sempre sì, is not saying something naive. It requires courage precisely because some of us were formed to see and expect the worst. The valley is right there, familiar and close, and it is full of reasons not to hope.

But the song won. And the piste, even if it is gone, is not lost. It lives in every child who watched their parents dance and understood, without words, what it meant.