Legend of French song, Salvatore Adamo was born in Sicily, during the war, in 1943. Three years later, his parents emigrated to Belgium so that his father could work in the mines. Little by little, the siblings grew and Salvatore became the eldest of the eight children of the Adamo couple. In 1960, Salvatore was 17 when he won a Radio Luxembourg competition. Three years later, his title Without you my love met with success: it was the beginning of his musical career. But his happiness is marred by a tragedy that occurred when he was a young man of 22. The sudden death of his father, aged 46, during the summer of 1966.
Invited to speak on Michel Drucker’s legendary red sofa this Sunday, June 16, Salvatore Adamo recounts this drama. On August 7, 1966, while the star was in concert in Biarritz, the whole family was gathered on the beach of Punta Braccetto, in the south of Sicily, near the restaurant that the singer gave to his father. The 80-year-old artist was therefore not there but we retraced the scene during which one of his sisters and a cousin pretended to drown. “And my father thought they were in trouble, he dove in. The water was very cold, he had just eaten… Well, it was a bad combination of circumstances. He had a hydrocution: a heart attack in water. So“, he told the famous interviewer of Roll on Sunday.
“I had the pleasure of making his dream come true”
A disappearance which deeply marked Salvatore Adamo at the time. The artist even planned to fulfill his father’s deepest wish. “I had the pleasure of making his dream come true: it was to open a small restaurant in Italy, which he unfortunately did not even have time to inaugurate.“, regrets the famous Italian-Belgian today. He keeps unforgettable memories of his father figure. “My father had a flair, he could have been an artist too. We hear him, he has an extraordinary sense of repartee and when there were family celebrations, he was the entertainer and the entertainer while my mother was all shy“, depicts Salvatore Adamo, touched by the evocation of these memories.
