A walk across Bari to witness the strange southern Italian folklore surrounding Napolitano singer Nino D’Angelo.
Five thousand people chanting the name of Nino D’Angelo as if it’s the Curva Nord.
That’s the scene waiting at the Palaflorio – predominantly an ice rink and one of southern Italy’s largest indoor arenas – on a Thursday night in Bari.
Japigia isn’t the most scenic side of the city. Concrete flyovers, shuttered garages, industrial units, the occasional abandoned car quietly decaying by the roadside. It’s the sort of neighbourhood where the city loses its polished Mediterranean charm and shows something closer to its bones.
To say it’s rough around the edges is probably doing it a favour. Long-associated with organised crime, there’s not much Bari Vecchia charm in Japigia.
Still, that’s where the Palaflorio sits; a cavernous multipurpose arena that most of the year looks more suited to basketball matches and trade fairs than cultural pilgrimages. Built in the 1990s, it has the same air of neglect and dilapidation as the slightly older Stadio San Nicola. This particular evening though it is hosting something that, judging by the crowds heading in its direction, carries the weight of a small regional ritual.
Tonight I walked 7.6 kilometres from Madonnella and back to see Nino D’Angelo. I didn’t know a huge deal about his music but curiosity – and the sense that something uniquely southern Italian might be unfolding – persuaded me to make the walk.
Outside the arena the atmosphere already had the energy of a football match. Clusters of dark tracksuit-clad ultras types hovered around the entrance smoking and drinking until the music started. The sort of young men who look like they could just as easily be waiting for the gates to open at a Serie B fixture.
Inside, things quickly loosened.
Peroni flowed freely. The occasional furtive cigarette glowed in darker corners despite the no-smoking signs. And it soon became clear that the concept of allocated seating was, at best, aspirational. You arrive late, you go where you can find space. People drifted between rows and sections with the relaxed disregard for rules that Southern Italy occasionally does so well.
This was working-class Bari out in force on a Thursday night to pay homage to one of their own.
The arena itself had an interesting social geography. The floor was slightly more genteel; couples, silver-haired older fans, people sitting patiently in their assigned seats. The stands were younger, louder and more restless. However, when Nino appeared and the music started, the divide disappeared. Teenagers, twenty-somethings, families and pensioners alike began chanting songs I had never heard straight back at the stage.
The Palaflorio arena in Bari during Nino D’Angelo’s “I miei meravigliosi anni ’80” tour, March 2026.
It was less like a pop concert and more like a football terrace or a night at the boxing.
And then there was Nino.
Now 68, and once famous for the improbable blonde bowl haircut that made him instantly recognisable across southern Italy in the 1980s, he appeared on stage immaculate in a black tuxedo. The contrast between the elegance of the man and the chaotic devotion of the crowd was part of the charm.
Throughout his set, he took his time greeting the room. Slowly turning from one section of the arena to another, waving, acknowledging the applause, soaking up the adulation for a moment, before jogging across to the other side.
The reaction bordered on devotional.
Nino D’Angelo onstage at Palaflorio and a mural of him in his prime blonde bowlcut-era, Napoli.
Song after song, thousands of voices rose to meet him. Lyrics were shouted back word for word by people who looked barely old enough to have been alive when some of them were first recorded. For someone unfamiliar with the catalogue, it was a slightly surreal experience to watch an entire arena sing along to songs you’d never heard before.
Musically the set wandered comfortably between eras and styles; flashes of blue-eyed disco, classic Italian pop, and gloriously melodramatic Napolitano ballads delivered with the kind of theatrical sincerity that modern pop often avoids.
It was unapologetically emotional.
Watching it all unfold, it became clear that trying to understand Nino D’Angelo purely as a pop singer misses the point slightly.
In the south of Italy certain figures exist in a different cultural space altogether. Antonio Cassano, the gifted but volatile footballer from Bari Vecchia, occupies a similar mythic territory here.
They become part of the folklore of a place. Nino’s songs have woven themselves into the everyday lives of the people who grew up with them. Weddings, car journeys, family parties, late-night bars. They stop belonging purely to the music industry and start belonging to the street.
D’Angelo – a son of Napoli who rose from working-class beginnings in the city’s suburbs to become one of the defining voices of Napolitano popular music – occupies that territory now. A figure whose story, like so many from southern Italy, brushes up against the complicated edges of local history and myth.
Which perhaps explains the intensity of nights like this.
Standing there in the Palaflorio, watching thousands of people chant his name with the fervour usually reserved for calcio heroes, it was obvious that what was happening went a little beyond entertainment.
The sort of evening that reminds you that culture doesn’t always live in galleries, theatres or respectable concert halls. Sometimes it lives in concrete arenas on the edge of slightly scruffy neighbourhoods, fuelled by cheap beer, shouted lyrics and a singer who has somehow become part of the mythology of a place.
To think that I nearly chose watching Tottenham at home over this – their capitulation continued with a 3-1 home defeat against Crystal Palace.
Down here Nino D’Angelo isn’t just a performer.
He’s folklore.