Chapter 06
RTV, Song Contests and Current Scenes Share the Stage
7 min
Television can make a three-minute song look like the natural centre of a nation's music. In San Marino, that illusion is especially strong because the international screen is vastly larger than the domestic territory. The correct response is not to dismiss Eurovision. It is to hear San Marino RTV as one institution among several and to read selection as a precise kind of relationship.
Representation is a job, not a birthplace
Miodio's Complice began San Marino's Eurovision participation in 2008 with an Italo-Sammarinese group. Valentina Monetta, a Sammarinese singer, represented the broadcaster four times and reached the final with Maybe. Those careers contain a direct local identity.
Senhit is Italian, born in Bologna to Eritrean parents. She represented San Marino with Stand By in 2011, was selected with Freaky! for the cancelled 2020 contest, returned with Adrenalina in 2021 and won the 2026 San Marino Song Contest with Superstar featuring Boy George. Her long relationship with RTV is real and substantial. It does not turn her citizenship Sammarinese.
Serhat is Turkish. With Say Na Na Na he reached the 2019 final and placed nineteenth, San Marino's best result at that time. The song's spoken-sung verses and immediate repeated hook are designed for rapid recognition. Its success belongs to the broadcaster's representational history and to Serhat's career, not to a fictional San Marino pop lineage.
This distinction also applies to Achille Lauro, Piqued Jacks, Megara and Gabry Ponte. They won or received Sammarinese selection and carried the broadcaster's flag. Their performances were staged through San Marino's selection process. That is enough to discuss without absorbing them into a list of musicians from the republic.
Una Voce created production as well as a winner
Una Voce per San Marino began as the selection process for the 2022 contest. Its rules welcomed international emerging artists and established names, using auditions, semifinal broadcasts and a final in the republic. In 2022, six Sammarinese artists appeared among 65 emerging contestants, and a dedicated local semifinal advanced Garon X Duan, Giada Pintori and Giulia Vitri.
Achille Lauro ultimately won with Stripper. The headline traveled outward, but the inward value included rehearsal hires, camera crews, audio engineers, presenters, stage managers and local competitors working in the same production week. Teatro Titano and Teatro Nuovo became parts of a broadcast factory. The event can matter to local music even when the winner comes from elsewhere.
The series later developed under the San Marino Song Contest name. Piqued Jacks won with Like an Animal, Megara with 11:11, and Gabry Ponte with Tutta l'Italia. Each title reflects the open competition more than a stable national genre. The contest is best understood as San Marino using sovereignty and broadcasting rights to build an international event.
The 2026 final exposed both scales at once
The 2026 San Marino Song Contest final took place at Teatro Nuovo in Dogana on 6 March. Twenty-one songs appeared in a television-scale programme. Among them, Marco Cervellini carried the specific local connection with Shine. Working as Marco, he writes and self-produces electronic music across synth-pop, dark wave and dance. The track's pulse and layered synthesizers frame vulnerability as forward motion: a restrained verse field opens toward a brighter, more forceful refrain.
Senhit featuring Boy George won with Superstar. Boy George co-wrote and produced the song and added a vocal cameo. Its polished dance-pop surface, firm kick and chorus lift suit the competition's large visual frame. At Eurovision in Vienna, it finished fourteenth in its semifinal. The result matters less here than the identity chain: an Italian performer and British collaborator won a contest organized in San Marino and represented San Marino RTV. Marco's Shine, although it did not win, is the local finalist's authored recording.
The contest should therefore be read in two directions. Outward, it purchases attention for a small broadcaster. Inward, it gives local artists a production benchmark and puts Dogana's theatre into a network of writers, managers and crews. Neither direction makes it the entire culture.
Collective records make local connection explicit
San Marino United Artists formed to give musicians of the republic a shared record. Sogno, released in 2020, was written by Miodio members Nicola Della Valle, Paolo Macina and Francesco Sancisi, coordinated by Della Valle and shaped under Andrea Felli's artistic direction. Its cast included Valentina Monetta, Sara Jane Ghiotti, Monica Hill, Irol, Piermatteo Carattoni, Anita Simoncini, Alessandra Busignani, ELU, Moghe, Francesco Zazzi, Paolo Beccari and Fabrizio Pregnolato.
The arrangement begins from an accessible ballad language: piano, four violins and a modern rhythmic base. Its distinctive mechanism is succession. Different singers carry lines in their own timbres, so handoffs between solo voices create the ensemble. Irol's rap changes verbal density; a jazz-trained voice rounds a phrase differently from a rock singer; the returning refrain supplies common ground.
In 2025 the collective's Quasi Invisibile joined singers including Sara Jane Ghiotti, Monica Sarti and Mafy Ember around a work connected to the international day opposing violence against women. The title's subject calls for a different collective function: visibility is created by several named voices lending attention to what social habit overlooks. Radio San Marino interviews allowed the public to hear how the work was made.
Anita Simoncini offers another direct citizen link. With Italian singer Michele Perniola, she performed Chain of Lights for San Marino in 2015. The duet's alternating lines and joined chorus make partnership literal. Simoncini is Sammarinese; Perniola is Italian. Naming both prevents a duet from being flattened into one national biography.
Idols SM performed Come noi at Junior Eurovision in 2024. Francesco Sancisi, Nicola Della Valle and Paolo Macina wrote it, extending Miodio's creative work into a younger vocal group. The record uses direct Italian pop phrasing, group identity and a concise competition form. Its deeper local relevance is the chain from established writers to young performers through RTV.
Youth scenes also exist away from televised selection. The Rejected appeared in 2025 programming as a young punk-rock band from the Titano. School choirs and IMS ensembles place young musicians in less amplified settings. A student can move from early music play to orchestra, from a rehearsal room to a park festival, or from home production to Teatro Nuovo. No single path has to validate the others.
The Rejected's billed live set at San Marino Comics in 2025 placed a young local punk band on a major public stage. Guitars, drums and stage volume met a youth audience in the same temporary room, showing a scene through performance rather than through a long catalogue.
Paco Zafferani supplies a different local story. Born in San Marino, he brought the self-written Until the End to the 2025 San Marino Song Contest. Its urban production and direct vocal delivery place a Sammarinese author-performer inside the international contest without making the contest his whole identity. Alongside Marco's self-produced Shine, it shows that local participation can begin with authorship rather than selection alone.
Current music is plural and close to work
Necrofilia's Vier, Piermatteo Carattoni's current soundtrack and Purgatorio work, Marco's Shine, San Marino United Artists' Quasi Invisibile, Sara Jane Ghiotti's continuing jazz practice and IMS's fiftieth-season activity make 2025-26 musically legible. “Current” does not mean all these records share an aesthetic. It means their titles, performers and institutional connections can be located.
The scene's constraints are real. A tiny local audience limits ticket and sales scale. Musicians need work across the border. A band may disappear between releases; a venue programme changes seasonally. Yet density brings advantages. Teachers know performers; RTV can interview a local artist directly; castello committees can place music near residents; a composer can connect classroom, festival and theatre without passing through a distant national bureaucracy.
The differences are the point; a single Sammarinese signature would conceal them. In Kill in My Name, distorted guitars and drums make pressure. In L'amore e tutto qui, arranged space makes pressure. In Everything Moves, a filter and delayed drop make pressure. In Crisalide, tempo change makes pressure. In the anthem, public expectation makes a restrained phrase carry weight. The republic's coherence lies in the network that lets all these mechanisms be heard.
