He was the pop singer from Puglia who gave the world one of its catchiest songs, an ode to love and romance that is still played all over the world more than half a century after it was first performed.
But there is little that is fun or light-hearted about the row which, 20 years on from his death, has enveloped Domenico Modugno, the man dubbed "Mr Volare" for the song that made him a star.
For the past 12 years, Fabio Camilli, a moderately well-known Italian actor whose mother worked as a choreographer at Il Sistina theatre in Rome, has been fighting a legal battle to prove that he is Modugno's "secret" fourth son and, as such, potentially eligible for a slice of his significant royalties.
The claims are disputed by the cantautore's family: his widow, Franca Gandolfi, and three sons, Marcello, Marco and Massimo.
But on Tuesday, Italy's top appeals court handed Camilli a significant victory, ruling definitively, following DNA testing, that he is not the biological son of Romano Camilli – the man who raised him as his father.
The judgment paves the way for a verdict in a separate but intricately linked case being heard in another court in Rome, which is now expected to rule within days. It will determine whether there is enough evidence to prove that Camilli, 50, is indeed Modugno's biological son.
After being debuted by a young, thinly moustachioed Modugno at the San Remo music festival in 1958, the song Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu (In the Sky, Painted Blue) – commonly known as simply Volare (To Fly) – went on to become a smash hit all over the western world, topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States and selling more than 22m copies.
Co-written with Franco Migliacci – who said he came up with the idea for it thanks to a potent combination of Marc Chagall's dream-like paintings and copious amounts of wine – the song launched Modugno as a star in Italy and beyond. He went on to sing, act, produce films, and, ultimately, go into politics for the Radical party in Italy. But ill health increasingly plagued him and he died, aged 66, in 1994.
