Giorgia Todrani (born 26 April 1971), best known as simply Giorgia, is an Italian singer. Known for her wide vocal range, high belting register and great vocal abilities, she is one of the most famous Italian singers, she has released ten studio albums all enjoying commercial success. Giorgia has become fairly well known throughout Europe as an ambassador for Italian pop music.

Giorgia holds the first place among the female Italian artists of her generation for number of weeks in the Fimi-Nielsen chart, and she has sold over 7 million records worldwide, with 12 top-ten albums of which 5 number-one on the Italian album chart, and 24 top-ten singles of which 5 number-one hits on the Italian singles chart. She has participated four times at the Sanremo Music Festival, in 1995, in 1996, in 2001 and in 2023, placing at the first, third, second and sixth place respectively. At the Sanremo Music Festival 1995, she has won 4 prizes in the same night (Festival First Awards, Radio/TV Awards, Authors Awards and “Mia Martini” Awards), holding the unbeaten Sanremo record of a winning artist collecting all the prizes at once. In her career Giorgia has won 8 Italian and Wind Music Awards, a David di Donatello, a Nastro d’Argento and a “Premio Lunezia”.

Giorgia was born in Rome and started performing at an early age in several Roman Jazz clubs. She was influenced by classic soul and jazz artists such as Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Jackson among others. She recorded two live albums in the early 1990s, called One more go round and A Natural Woman.

Her debut was on the stage of the Ariston theatre for the 1994 Sanremo Music Festival when she sang “E poi” in the category Nuove Proposte (New Acts). At that festival she won 7th position in the final New Act chart (losing to Andrea Bocelli who praised her in his winning speech). E poi, is still nowadays one of her most famous songs.

Her debut-album Giorgia sold more than 160,000 records (it was a best seller in Italy and enjoyed good success in Germany too). A few months later Luciano Pavarotti asked her to perform with him in a duet at the annual Pavarotti & friends show in Modena, Italy where she gave a performance of Queen’s Who Wants to Live Forever. She also sang with the famous tenor. In 1994 Giorgia won the European Award as “best Young Italian artist”.

In 1995 she returned to the Sanremo Music Festival, singing “Come saprei”. She won the competition and the critics’ award too, becoming the second artist to achieve that (the first being Domenico Modugno) but being the first Italian female singer to win both awards. During the competition she won 4 awards. Her second album Come Thelma & Louise sold more than 300,000 copies. In the same year, Todrani recorded the song “Vivo per lei” with tenor Andrea Bocelli.

In 1996 she entered the Sanremo Music Festival for the third time with the song “Strano il mio destino” and ended in third place. Strano il mio destino – Live & studio 95/96 is the title of her third release, which included live tracks, the Sanremo single and another studio recording. The album sold 270,000 copies.

In the middle of 1997 she released a cover of an old Italian song by Ornella Vanoni called “Un’ora sola ti vorrei”, with a new music sound r&b oriented and a new image; later that year, her 3rd studio album “Mangio troppa cioccolata” was released and started a new dimension on her career, with less ballads and more uptempos, focusing more on the sound and in the interpretation than in the vocals, something that would become a prerogative in her subsequent releases. This album was released in ten European countries enjoying good commercial success. The same year music television “MTV Europe”asked Giorgia to present a tv program, but she rejected the proposal.

After the release of a song from another soundtrack movie called “Il cielo in una stanza” (a cover of an Italian song by Gino Paoli),in early 1999 she released her 4th studio album called “Girasole” , a very melodic and pop oriented record that gave her more success, helped by the hit single “Girasole”, one of the top selling Italian songs of the middle of 1999. The same year she toured internationally alongside jazz legend Herbie Hancock.

In 2000 Ray Charles invited her to one of his concerts and asked her to sing “Georgia on My Mind” after she told him that her father named her Giorgia in honour of the song. Giorgia produced “Girasole” by herself; thanks to this album (one of the most successful of her career) she became more widely known. The same year she sang a duet with Michael McDonald, in Turin during her concert and in his concert in Milan. In the middle of 2000, in her Fai Sentire La Tua Voce Tour 2000 she performed a duet with Lionel Richie in All Night Long at the Ericsson Summer Festival. 2000 was also the year of her performance at the Primo Maggio festival that included a reworking of Prince’s Nothing compares to you (2 U).