Ti si mangiate la banana by Leone Di Lernia (1994)

Leone Di Lernia, born in 1938, spent the 1990's rewriting the decade's dance hits in Apulian dialect with lyrics about food, and became the comic voice of Radio 105's Lo Zoo di 105. Ti si mangiate la banana is his most celebrated parody: the beat of one of the biggest summer hits of the 1990's, and over it an accusation, repeated at full volume, that somebody has eaten the "banana". The sources call it a food song. Italy has never once sung it as one, not even at lunch.

It came out in 1994, a year after Corona's original, and lived on radio and television rather than on charts, which is how trash-demenziale, the deliberately stupid comedy music of the period, worked. Di Lernia died in 2017, and the pieces marking his death put this song first, ahead of everything else he recorded.

Its afterlife is the sing-along. It is the Italian song most likely to start spontaneously at a wedding in Puglia and the one that proves the "banana" is a cross-border standard, from Bo Carter's fruit basket in 1931 to Lio's split in 1979 to a man from Puglia in 1994. Labelled interpreted because the joke is universal and the record calls it lunch.