This is how Italian disco died
The joy of disco got a D&G rebrand
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Ask my wife about my flaws, and she immediately tells you that I have two unbearable issues. The biggest one is my lack of humor. Or more like, my humor is too cynical and ironic that it isn’t humor at all. The second is the absolute lack of taste in music. She was a Zumba choreographer and dated jazz musicians before me, so she probably knows. I don’t think she is right on the humor part. But she is right with the music.
Yet, this post will be about Italodisco. We have a recurring playlist in the car with Italodisco tunes, sure. Do I know it? No. I had to ask my AI about Mina and De André for this article. But I’m still writing this article for two reasons.
First, there is a growing trend where English-speaking young people have a thing with Italodisco. Everyone is crazy about Italian pop. Not the ones from today (though I’m sure everyone has a thing for Damiano David), but the ones from the 60s and 70s, even the 80s. So this topic is popular, and frankly, why not jump on it? Especially since I have a second reason…
Which is why this article got written in the first place: I realized that I live in the epicenter, or the Mecca, or whatever it is, for Italodisco. I live in Versilia (guide is here), in Marina di Pietrasanta (piece is here), which is between Lido di Camaiore and Forte dei Marmi (piece is here). For all of you, fans: La Bussola, Capannina, Bussoladomani, and the new ones, Twiga, Franco Mare, Faruk, all of them are here, a 5-10 minute walk from my house.
And I have never written a piece on how disco died here. Until now.
A confession before the music nerds arrive: Italodisco technically means the synth stuff of the 80s, made in Milan studios and danced on the other coast, in Rimini’s megaclubs. What my beach (Versilia) made is older and bigger: the Italian pop that came before, the singers themselves. I’ll keep saying Italodisco anyway, because that’s how you found this article, plus I’m lazy enough not to care about when to use Italopop and Italodisco. And disco sounds sexier anyway.
The local disco heritage part 1: the beach
So, I can write this part without knowing anything about Mina or others. If Italodisco has a place, it is the beach club. An establishment that plays music by the beach. It is super fashionable today, look at almost all European island destinations. It all started in Versilia, on the shores of Tuscany, where I live.
Versilia is the original Italian beach. Rimini, Venice Lido, Liguria, anything on the South of Italy? All copies of Versilia. The very first bagno opened in Viareggio in 1827 (one for men, one for women). Bathing in the sea wasn’t considered leisure back then. It was medicine, prescribed like a spa cure. Later, Viareggio went full Belle Époque on the turn of the century. You can still catch that in the older bagnos and the old palazzi on the shore. Then the Agnelli family built their villa in Forte dei Marmi, then came fascism (unrelated to the Agnelli villa), where medicinal bathing turned into sport, vitals, and physical activity. There you go, you have something closer to current beach culture.
The oldest club that is still operating and where there was live music was officially opened in 1929. It’s called La Capannina di Franceschi. Literally translates to “Franceschi’s little hut.” The origin story is funny and interesting at the same time. Achille Franceschi, the original owner, hence the name on the brand, had a little hut on the shores of Forte dei Marmi, which was mostly a forest area with a fort and a couple of villas. At that time, there was no marina or anything. The only built-out beach-like thing was in Viareggio, with some hotels. This place was partially swamp, partially forest, then a grand stretch of beach. Some people built villas there, like Agnelli, but I’m not even sure there were roads or anything. Achille had his literal small hut here, which was a hut with some tables and a gramophone. It was a local carpenter’s tool shed, originally (remember, forest is next door).
Achille put down some tables and some music. As said, he only wanted to play cards with his friends, mostly local aristocrats. Then, the air minister, Italo Balbo, who was a great aviator at that time (and a Blackshirt fascist, by the way), landed his seaplane on the shores. Achille, like a proper bar owner, immediately made sure that Balbo got a bottle of champagne, the waiter was running through the sand with it. A year later, the bar was officially open.
There was a war mid-journey in our story. Let’s skip that part. Italo Balbo got shot down by his own air defense guns, weird. Capannina still operated, probably put up Bavarian beers on the menu. It got burned down completely in 39, unrelated to Bavarians. But at least, it finally got its kinda-current form.
Then this hiccup called war ended, and it was finally OK to serve Americano cocktails, and there was a postwar boom of everything. Half of Germany suddenly became democratic, because they had a choice and they chose The Right Thing, France had its moment, and Italy quickly became a destination for post-war-boom tourism. Rimini copied Viareggio early on, so they were prepped for the boom. Liguria and Jesolo were more like consequences of this boom. Jesolo basically became a German holiday destination, Liguria was the same for the Frenchies. It’s the same pretty much today.
Meanwhile, Versilia, the original daddy of beaches, already had two things. The kiss of the aristocracy and big money in the form of heritage hotels and bagnos, and the concept of a beach club. It’s the late 1950s. By that time, Versilia already had more than a 100-year-long history as a beach destination. The clubs were already running (Capannina was the origin, but since then, many more came). The industrialists and old aristocrats from Turin and Milan all came to Versilia, years before it was cool. The villas and the 5-star hotels (the Principe di Piemonte, a hotel still operating today, was built in the 1920s) were already up for decades.
TLDR: while Rimini, Jesolo and the others had nitpicking German pensioners thinking twice about paying for a slice of pizza, and favoring camping anyway (no pun intended here!), Versilia had something that the Italian Adriatic never has, and still doesn’t have. Cash.
So, with all that money and audience there, what would you do? Disco. Of course, you would disco the fuck up.
The local disco heritage part 2: the club
The second part of the beach club. The origin story of the Capannina is well-known. But then something also happened, and it didn’t happen in Italy. It happened everywhere. There was this weird rise of music that was called pop. And there were these things called singers who had these songs, and some of them, mostly in the USA, performed in clubs. The music history is another story, but let’s just say: Versilia’s position was more than ideal at that time to become the European epicenter of music and where the entire Italian disco was born. It had the money to pay the fees of the visiting artists. It had a beach with a glamorous history. And it had the clubs where these events could happen.
So back to the late 50s, while Rimini was busy serving cheap bratwurst and pizza with sausages, Versilia started building out the foundations for disco.
If Capannina is a legend, then La Bussola is a miracle. What Studio54 was for America, La Bussola (the compass) was for Italy. Except, like anything else, Studio54 was also a copy of anything that happened in Versilia. The club went live in 1955 under Sergio Bernardini (Studio54 opened in ‘77). Ok, so we need to talk about Sergio first.
Sergio, our boy, is from Tuscany, from a modest background, grew up in Paris, where his mom worked as a nanny for the kids of Louis Lumière. You know, the dude who invented cinema. So Sergio, who opened his club, La Bussola, grew up in the household of the guy who started cinema. Then they came back, Sergio got cocky and became a partisan against fascists, job well done, then settled down in Viareggio, started to run dance venues, then with some help, started La Bussola. He died in 1993. Streets are named after him here. His memoir: I have never lost my compass (Non ho mai perso la Bussola). Beautiful.
La Bussola quickly became the place where all the big names performed. Almost all big Italian singers started here, from Mina to De André. Mina was actually on a summer holiday in 1958 with her family, only 18, jumped on stage, started singing, and the legend was born. Her last performance was also here, about twenty years later (1978), in the Bussoladomani tent. She never appeared in public ever again. Her only three live albums were all recorded here. De André also was terrified of live performances; he waited years after his stardom got kicked in, and later he gave his first-ever live concert here.
But Sergio felt the times were changing, so he quickly built a new annex to the club, the Bussolotto, a smoky little club next to the main stage. The Bussolotto immediately signed the jazz world as we know it today. Sinatra, Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke, Aretha, Baker, I don’t know, everyone had to stop and perform on the main stage. And for the initiated, the Bussolotto ran until dawn. These weren't just stops. These concerts were prominent ones, starts or ends of European tours. On one night, there was a sold-out concert in the salon, a young pianist played there. His name was Romano Mussolini, the duce’s jazz pianist son, signed up by partisan Sergio in post-war Italy. What a night.
These events were all frequented by affluent high-rollers. So Bussola was the place for these artists where they felt that they got understood. It was also an intimate setting. The club is not big, the salon is even smaller. All of them sit 10 meters by the sea, surrounded by pine and palm trees, far from the grandiose promenade of Viareggio. Playing there, going there, it was almost like a sacred act.
The peak of the era
It’s the 60s and the 70s. Disco is peaking. Capannina gets a full-blown renovation. While the club was an orchestra place for dancing high society from Milan and Turin, the 50s changed the game. Capannina is a small place, so it was an even more intimate venue for big stars who came to Bussola.
On the floors of Capannina, in 1966, a young and bold window dresser from Piacenza met a young, quiet accountant from Pietrasanta, named Sergio Galeotti. The other guy’s name was Giorgio Armani. In 1975, together they founded a company, The Armani Group. Sergio sadly passed away from AIDS in 1985. Giorgio bought Capannina for sentimental value in 2025, because that is where he met the love of his life. He died 8 days after the announcement. The sales contract gets finalized by Armani Group lawyers in the local notary office. The club has been closed since then, under renovation. The club was run by Franceschi, the original owner, all throughout the 60s, until 1977.
Meanwhile, the Bussola has its peak. In the 60s and 70s, literally anyone you knew and had anything to do with pop music had an event here. Completely pointless to list them. All of them. The Bussola became a cultural icon, so much so that when the 68 student movement had to pick a target to rebel against, they picked the Bussola. The NYE event (which was always the peak of all events at Bussola) turns into a riot. Police come out, shots are fired, and a guy ends up in a wheelchair.
Bussola peaks so much so that it expands. After the construction of the jazz salon, the Bussolotto, Bernardini builds a giant tent in the nearby park in 1976. The forest there had just been cleared and turned into a public park. Tent up, and the Bussoladomani was born. It became a giant festival venue.
Meanwhile, more copies emerged, some of them in Versilia. Rimini and the Adriatic coast realize that this beach club is a thing, so they also start doing it, about a hundred years late in the game. Anything that is similar across the Atlantic or anything in Latin America? It’s a copy too from here (some of them were started by Italian emigrants).
Parallel, Sanremo gets a memo that there is a thing called TV that is becoming popular. Figures that they have a huge theater and casino and money to play for singers. Why not merge this spiel with this thing called TV? The Sanremo festival is born. Funnily, it started as a radio show. Then became a TV event.
And this odd little thing, the TV, that’s where everything tanked.
How Italian disco died
At least here, in Versilia. It’s mostly because of the TV. If we have to name anyone or anything as a villain, it should be the TV. Before TV, you had to either listen to these singers on records or the radio, or you had to visit them at concerts. With TV, you just needed to press the ON button.
Yes, there were still affluent people paying money to go to live parties. But they got older. And it’s the late 70s and early 80s. Economic boom for everyone. People suddenly got money to burn on travel. Mass tourism, or anything close to it, gets its start. Hotels emerge after hotels, small villas, vacation homes, and so on. We are not at the “buy Sorrento Lemon here” and fridge magnet idiocracy yet, but we are getting there. And what do you do when you see a bunch of new-money people flooding your favorite old-money club? You run inside your gated community. You quickly start asking entry ticket fees, stoked up high ones, of course, start charging a premium just to sit down, and so on. Basically, economically speaking, you cut out the proles. Let them have their aperitivo in a cheap bar where there is maybe a guy playing on a synthesizer.
I know it smells a bit of a class war here, but the by-then huge infrastructure that the Bussola and other clubs had here was financially unsustainable. The world turned to big TV stars. The 80s were about a small number of overpaid huge stars, not about niche pop singers. The DJ-era wasn’t there yet. So, our two players?
Franceschi operated La Capannina, and Bernardini also led La Bussola all throughout the 60s and 70s. They frequently collaborated as well. Musicians went on the big stages at Bussola, but gave a limited-availability, close-knit event at Capannina. But as TV got more popular and the stretch of Versilia became popular for foreign tourists as well, the economics started to crumble.
Franceschi had his prime in the 70s. The details are murky, but the Capannina got sold to the Guidi family in 1977 (Carla and Gherardo, two local hospitaliers). It was a smaller place, profitable after its peak, but still a local legend, still open. The beach had its popularity in comedy, the movie Sapore di mare was shot mostly in La Capannina. The place reinvents itself as a beach bar, rather than a disco club. The Guidi family managed it well and kept the heritage clear. The name is still unchanged. The structure is still the last renovation, 50s style. Gherardo passed away in 2024, and the heirs sold the place to Armani. It was promised that it would be open this summer, but renovation is still underway. Since La Capannina stopped being a disco club, I am sure it will reopen. It’s also in Forte dei Marmi, where even the sunbeds are D&G branded, so I’m sure the Armani Group finds a way to keep it open.
The Bussola though? Well, the tent finances weren’t so generous. As I said, his memoir is titled: I have never lost my compass. In the early 80s he sold the Bussola to, guess what, the same Guidi family. The disco operated throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s as a club. It became a place for local clubbing, but with zero glamour of the 60s and 70s, it was a classic dancehall. Word is that it was barely profitable and the only thing that made real money was the original jazz salon turned into a beach bar. A bagno. Similarly to La Capannina. The tent turned back into a park, Parco Bussoladomani, and it is currently running an annual summer festival in June and July. Similar concept that Sergio had. This year we had Nick Cave as one of the leads.
There was a documentary made about the club’s peak era:
By the mid-2000s, the last of the clubs got closed down. By this time, Bussola got surrounded by local villas, residents who lived there, and smaller hotels. In 2007, noise complaints led to the club closing its doors. Relaunched as Bussola Versilia. Goes to the ground within years. A local family leases the place; the Guidi family is still the owner. Rent is unpaid, litigation, lawyers, I don’t know, sad story. The last NYE party was in 2023/24. I was surrounded by teens wearing long coats and pretty much nothing else. Since then, it’s closed. The heirs of the Guidi family sold La Capannina to Armani for a rumored 12 million euros. They can’t sell La Bussola. The bagno next door is still open, though, as it is the only one that still makes some money.
So, disco died because no one is interested in real live music anymore. You go to concerts for the show. Spectacle that you can’t watch on TV. For anything else, you have screens. Mass clubbing moved to DJ sets, and they are moving to where the masses are: Rimini, Ibiza, etc. The irony: the ones that copied the format are the ones that kept it somewhat alive.
While Rimini’s clubs are affordable for everyone, Versilia’s new club scene priced out the original audience. Because there are new players in this game, yes. A table at these new clubs costs more than an Italian starting salary, so the local kids drink at the free beach, doing their own parties, if any, and the temples that formed the Italian pop and disco scenes are waiting for new customers who can pay for the experience.
Enter a generation that can pay…
The new clubs and their new crowd
This new generation is, of course, the Millennials. They are 40+ now, and some of them made big-time cash. But most of them are new money. The ones who go to Miami, Marbella, and Ibiza.
Now, we can argue endlessly that new-money people have zero taste, lack any cultural value, any shame, or a highly questionable reputation and source of money. But I am sure people said the same things about those who frequented La Capannina or La Bussola in the 1930s and early 1950s. First money comes, then culture and taste enter (hopefully) in the third and fourth generations. You look at the Getty Foundation today, and it’s an amazing collection. Never forget it was started by JP Getty. Sure, we don’t see a Zuckerberg art collection or a Bezos gallery yet, but who knows. Ok, if I look at them, I know the answer, but hey, I’m still optimistic…
So whatever we think about this new crowd of new money bag holders and their new expectations from a club, the thing is, they are here, and the clubs are here for them.
Speaking of these people, here is Flavio Briatore (Benetton + F1 + Heidi Klum + Naomi Campbell + fraud convictions, later amnestied, you know, new money stuff). He started Twiga in 2001, one of the first of these clubs around here. Since then, we have plenty. The recipe is the same for almost all of them: hundreds of euros just for booking a table, expensive everything, DJs are more like background music for dinner, because people would rather sit and eat raw shellfish with prosecco, while their girlfriend dances slowly holding her glass of champagne in one hand, Birkin in the other.
This recipe works so well that Flavio sold Twiga in 2025 to Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, who already owned one of the clubs here, Franco Mare (currently named Casa Fiori Chiari Versilia). Don’t know who Del Vecchio is? Well, you probably wear some of his products on your head already. He is the heir of the company Luxottica, which controls most of the eyewear market on this planet. Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Persol are all owned by Luxottica, which also makes eyewear for most premium brand names. It was founded by the late Leonardo Del Vecchio. The Del Vecchio family is one of the wealthiest, most influential families in Italy and also in the world.
And that is how the circle completes. The clubs that started as new money places in the late 90s and early 2000s now become prestige locations for the new rich. The Del Vecchio fortune is already in its second generation. Leonardo Maria is in his early 30s now. By the time he has his heirs, the entire fortune becomes old money. And these clubs, that are currently accessible mostly for the rich, become legendary places. Or will they?
This year, Twiga co-branded their entire beach club with Dolce & Gabbana. Last week, we biked late in the evening (it’s so hot here during summer that we can only bike after 8 pm) and passed Twiga.
The night had just started. Groups of people got out from their limos, SUVs, and black minivans, usually accompanied by a guide or a host. We let them through the bike lane. All groups were the same (we saw 3) as if they were grown somewhere. Guy in late 40s, 50s, bald, not very handsome but looks like someone with a bankroll. Usually the only man in the group. And then, a group of ladies, various ages. As you would imagine, yes, couldn’t tell if they are his daughter, girlfriend, or paid company. Oh, and of course, none of the groups were Italian. Frankly, it was funny to watch this scene.
If you are around Versilia this or any next year, don’t forget the age-old trick: the sea is for everyone, and no one can close it down for you. Start your walk from the bagno of Bussola Versilia, the current version and last remnant of La Bussola. Walk north towards Forte dei Marmi. Pass the clubbing beaches like Code, Petra, the free beach of Kevin, and immediately next to the boat harbor, the pricey Borsalino’s Panama beach. Pass through the pontile di Tonfano and from there, the party is yours. Faruk starts it on your left, then Franco Mare Casa Fiori Chiari Versilia, then for a good walk, you end up at Twiga. It’s on the border of Forte dei Marmi and Pietrasanta. Walk 5 more minutes, and you are at La Capannina.
This entire article is a 30-minute walk by the beach. The sunbeds, the umbrellas, the music: it’s all free to see from the sea that never left this story.
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