Giovanni Capurro was an Italian poet and songwriter.
He preferred music (flute) to the technical studies to which he had been initiated by his father, graduating from the Conservatory.
Capurro was a brilliant man, cultured and a welcome guest in the living rooms where he sang, played the piano and made amusing imitations. From a very young age he devoted himself to poetry by first publishing the Napulitanate in 1887, and then Carduccianelle, where he adapted to the Neapolitan the Greek metric that Giosuè Carducci had dusted off a few years earlier in the Odi Barbare.
But his most famous composition is undoubtedly the lyrics of 'O sole mio, set to music by Eduardo di Capua. Despite the extraordinary success of the song, Capurro, as it was for the other author of the song, died very poor in Naples in 1920.
