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A Roman Rapper Comes to New York, Where He Can Get Real

When Jovanotti, a pioneering Italian rapper, was starting out in the 1980s, he and his producers tried to emulate the sound of the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC as produced by Rick Rubin. They had all the right equipment, like the Roland 808 drum machine, but no matter what they did, they could not get their tracks to sound as powerful.

“We tried to do exactly the same thing, but we couldn’t make it sound so rude,” Jovanotti recalled recently. “If you listen to my records of the same time as ‘Walk This Way,’ they sound small, while if I play ‘Walk This Way,’ it still sounds huge.”

Eventually he came to a realization about music and geography. “It’s not just Rick Rubin,” he said. “It’s the place.”

That place is New York City, sacred ground for any hip-hop fan and an especially mythical site for an artist who learned the craft from afar. After Jovanotti — a tall, shaggy-bearded Roman whose real name is Lorenzo Cherubini — released his first single in 1987, he went on to sell millions of records and join the fraternity of the famously mononymous (Bono, Pavarotti). He vies with a motorcycle racer, Valentino Rossi, for the title of Italy’s most-followed Twitter user.

Making a mark in New York remained an itch, though, so three years ago he began his pilgrimage, playing club shows in occasional series. Last month Jovanotti, 46, moved with his family to an apartment in Greenwich Village, and his American invasion began in earnest. In August a compilation of his work, “Italia: 1988-2012,” was released here by ATO Records, and on Saturday he will perform at Terminal 5 in Manhattan as part of a national tour.

When asked why he was taking a risk in a country that can be brutally indifferent to the pop of other tongues, Jovanotti said he was stimulated by the city’s energy and by the connection to his musical roots. But he acknowledged that “pure ambition” played a role.

“You respect Fellini here, you respect Roberto Benigni, you respect Antonioni,” he said. “Why is it that Italian pop music is totally off the radar? I just want to try to break that tradition.”

“Being somebody in America is the dream of every musician in the world,” he added.

His background is as much Old World as old school. He grew up around the Vatican, where his father was a guard. In 1979, at the age of 14, he saw a TV report about the new musical phenomenon taking shape in the Bronx and, though he could barely understand the words, was mesmerized by the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” He absorbed endless American sitcoms like “Happy Days,” a world far removed from the political and economic strife of Italy at the time.

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“Being somebody in America is the dream of every musician in the world,” said Jovanotti, Italian rapper.Credit...Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“The father was so funny and so nice,” he said of “Happy Days.” “My father was always tired and always hungry, while the father of Richie Cunningham was never hungry.”

His early records mimicked American rap, but by the 1990s he began to develop a more eclectic songwriting voice. He drew from the dusky romanticism of Italian ballads, and rhythms from Latin pop and from Africa, leading to songs like “L’Ombelico del Mondo,” a huge hit that might ring a bell for any tourist who passed through Italy in mid-90s. Political and social causes also made their way into his work.

Over a leisurely three-hour meal at an Italian restaurant near his new home he discussed his childhood in Rome, postwar Italian politics and his infatuation with American pop culture. He can be disarmingly chummy until he casually drops a conversational bomb underscoring his place among the ultra-elite, like: “I had the privilege to know opera through Luciano Pavarotti, who was a friend of mine — a real friend of mine.”

That magnetism, and the energy of his live performance, could help win over American audiences. So could his accessible and wide-ranging musical style, said Joseph Sciorra of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College. He also noted that Jovanotti’s arrival follows a mini-wave of other sophisticated Italian pop performers like Vinicio Capossela, Carmen Consoli and Avion Travel, who have been turning up at New York clubs and some American festivals in recent years.

“Jovanotti’s potential for success here in the States is that he is this consummate pop artist, knowing how to tap into what’s cool,” Mr. Sciorra said.

To sell him in America, Jovanotti’s label, ATO, is going after the “food and wine crowd,” said Jon Salter, the label’s general manager. That means pushing him at stores like Barnes & Noble and through noncommercial radio stations like KEXP in Seattle and WFUV in New York. So far the tastemakers love him, but that has not translated into big sales. According to Nielsen SoundScan, “Italia: 1988-2012” has sold about 1,000 copies in the United States.

Jovanotti can afford to take it slowly. He is dividing his time between New York and Italy, where he remains a megastar. Next summer he plans to do a tour of 15 soccer stadiums there, which could sell as many as one million tickets. “I don’t want to get rich in this country,” he said. “That’s not even something I’m thinking about.”

Instead, he said he is soaking up American culture, pulling all the inspiration he can from New York.

“It’s like tomatoes in Italy,” he said. “You cannot have these kinds of tomatoes here. In Whole Foods I can find wonderful tomatoes. But the tomatoes we have in July in Italy? It’s another thing.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Roman Rapper Comes to New York, Where He Can Get Real. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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