CHARLES DE CHASSIRON MEMORIAL LECTURE: THE MANY MEANINGS OF MINA, by Dr Rachel Haworth

Mina (Anna Maria Mazzini, born Lombardy, 1940) is an Italian popular music icon who throughout her sixty-year-long career has come to represent a range of diverse meanings. She is one of the best-loved popular music stars in Italy and abroad, with a large fan base across Europe, Asia, and South America. Her career began in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite having retired from public appearances at the end of the 1970s, Mina remains popular and successful today, and continues to release new albums that consistently debut in the number one spot of the Italian charts. Her popularity with Italian audiences can perhaps be explained whilst Mina is first and foremost a popular music star, she has also been a film star and a television personality during different phases of her career. She has advertised successful Italian brands on television, and she has been a magazine writer and agony aunt. She has thus become a household name in Italy. In this talk, we will discover precisely what kind of a star Mina is and what she signifies for audiences today. We will explore how her status as a diva has evolved during her career, how she has come to be a timeless icon of Italian popular music, and what she reveals about Italian culture and society from the 1950s to the present day.