Forget Domani

Forget Domani: Frank Sinatra and the Italian Romance of Summer 1965

Sinatra at Sixty and Still in the Game

The summer of 1965 was a fascinating moment in which to be Frank Sinatra. He was fifty years old, a generation older than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones who had invaded the American charts the previous year. The British Invasion had genuinely disrupted the pop landscape in which he had thrived for two decades, and yet Frank Sinatra remained a genuine commercial and cultural force, a living monument to a style of entertainment that the rock era seemed determined to supersede. His Reprise Records had given him both commercial and creative autonomy, and he was using that freedom to pursue projects that interested him rather than chasing the youth market on its own terms.

Sinatra in the mid-1960s was also navigating a personal landscape that had its own fascinations and complications. His relationship with the Rat Pack, his film career, his political associations, and his romantic life all kept him in the public eye in ways that went beyond his recordings alone. He was, in a sense that few entertainers have ever achieved, simply part of the permanent furniture of American popular culture, there regardless of what any particular chart cycle suggested.

The Film and the Song

Forget Domani came from the 1965 Italian-American romantic comedy film The Yellow Rolls-Royce, in which it was used on the soundtrack. The song was originally composed by Riz Ortolani, an Italian film composer who had won considerable recognition for his work on the 1962 documentary Mondo Cane, where his "More" became one of the most widely heard movie themes of the decade. Ortolani's gift for romantic melody was well established, and Forget Domani demonstrated it clearly.

The English lyrics were written by Norman Newell, and the song's subject was perfectly suited to Sinatra's particular romantic persona: a plea to set aside tomorrow and live completely in the present moment, to let the distractions of the future dissolve into the pleasure of now. It was the philosophy of the swinging bachelor translated into a gorgeous melodic frame, and Sinatra inhabited it with the ease of someone who had been living that philosophy for years.

A Summer Chart Run in 1965

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 26, 1965, entering at number 100. The chart trajectory was slow and steady, the track climbing incrementally through the summer weeks. The song reached its peak of number 78 on July 31, 1965, spending seven weeks total on the chart. The performance was modest by the standards of Sinatra's career peaks, but it registered genuine commercial presence in a marketplace that was increasingly hostile to artists of his generation.

The summer of 1965 was a particularly intense pop moment. The Beatles, the Beach Boys, and a wave of British and American rock acts dominated the upper reaches of the Hot 100. That Forget Domani found any purchase at all in that environment demonstrated the breadth of Sinatra's audience and the enduring appeal of the musical tradition he represented.

Sinatra, Italy, and a Particular Brand of Romance

Sinatra's relationship with Italian musical culture ran deep and in multiple directions. His own Italian-American heritage gave him a personal connection to the romantic tradition that Italian popular music represented, and over the course of his career he recorded numerous songs with Italian themes, subjects, or origins. Forget Domani fit naturally into that lineage, the Italian title (meaning "forget tomorrow") signaling a lyric philosophy deeply embedded in a romantic culture that prized living fully in the present.

The arrangement Sinatra chose for the recording reflected the lush orchestral style that had always been his natural habitat, comfortable in ways that no amount of chart upheaval could change. Put it on and feel the Mediterranean sun even through the radio static of that long-ago summer.

"Forget Domani" — Frank Sinatra's singular moment on the 1960s charts.