Little Tony

Antonio Ciacci (9 February 1941 – 27 May 2013), better known as Little Tony, was a Sammarinese singer and actor, who achieved success in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the lead singer of Little Tony & His Brothers, before returning to Italy where he continued a successful career as a singer and film actor.

Life and career Little Tony was born in Tivoli, Lazio, Italy, but was a citizen of San Marino, where his parents were born, and never applied for Italian citizenship. He formed a rock and roll group with his two brothers, Alberto and Enrico, in 1957, naming himself Little Tony in emulation of Little Richard. The following year, the group were signed by Durium Records, who released a series of covers of American rock and roll songs by them in Italy.

In 1959, the Italian singer Marino Marini, when in London, recommended the group to TV pop show producer Jack Good. Good visited Italy to meet the group, was impressed, and signed them up to appear in his British TV show Boy Meets Girls.

The group first revisited Italy in 1961 to appear at the Sanremo Festival when they performed the song "24.000 baci" with Adriano Celentano and finished second, returning more permanently the following year.

He also continued to record regularly through the 1960s, one of his biggest hits from Festival Sanremo '1967 is "Cuore matto" (crazy heart), no. 1 for nine consecutive weeks in 1967. It sold in excess of about six million copies and was awarded a gold disc in May 1967. Another successful song was "Quando vedrai la mia ragazza", which he performed in Festival Sanremo '1964, which sold almost one million copies, and later "Riderà", which sold over a million copies in 1966.

In the 1980s, the three singers Rosanna Fratello, Bobby Solo, and Little Tony and formed the group "Ro Bo T". In the late 1980s, Little Tony was in America and recorded several songs with Diana Ross and the Supremes. In the 1990s and 2000s, Little Tony participated in dozens of TV shows, particularly on Rai Uno and Canale 5, among others with the Italians Gianni Morandi, Rita Pavone, Adriano Celentano, Mara Venier and many others. He continued to record and perform successfully in Italy, despite suffering a heart attack during his show in Canada in 2006.