5 QUESTIONS WITH GIADA VALENTI

By LTAC Blog - January 2020

Giada Valenti will be at LTAC on Saturday, February 15 with her show An Evening with Giada Valenti: From Venice with Love. Get to know Giada a little better with these five questions before you go to the show! Tickets are available for the show here.

You’ll be here the day after Valentine’s Day, what can couples expect from the night? 

My show is a very romantic show with beautiful love songs. I love to share with my audience beautiful stories about the songs I sing and about my life. I always see couples getting closer to each other, hands touching and sometimes people sharing a little a kiss while I start to sing their favorite love song. 

It’s magical to see how to sing and talk about love makes love appear. All the time I receive messages from my audience about the experience they had at my concert. Some of them came to the concert as friends and fell in love and are now married. Some of my fans also have used my concert to pop the question when I start to sing certain songs. I feel privileged to know that my concert makes people happy and fall in love with love again. 

Do you have a favorite song to sing each night? Why do you love it? 

I sing songs that I love and that I have a personal connection with. And it happens to be that we are all human and share, most of the time, the same emotions. So, the songs I love are also loved by most people. If I had to pick one, that for sure is “La Vie En Rose.” I learned it when I was a little girl in Venice and it’s the song that made me dream to become a singer. I have learned French, one of the 5 languages I speak because I wanted to understand the meaning of the song. I’m singing “When he embraces me and he speaks to me softly words of love, my life is beautiful. I’m his and he is mine. That’s the reason why heart beats.” I think this song is simple and powerful just like love itself. And this song has become one of the favorite songs of my audience. I cannot leave any stage without singing it. I just did Carnegie Hall – a special concert dedicated to Italian and Hispanic music. I closed the show with “La Vie En Rose” and my audience gave me a standing ovation, happy I was singing this song, even in French. It’s surely a special song for me and my audience. It’s a magical song. 

What was it like filming a special for PBS? How did that opportunity come about and what did it mean to you? 

It was a dream coming true. I produced it myself with my manager and husband JJ. We worked very hard for several years. As an independent artist, I needed to find the money to produce it. We went to several lectures in NYC to learn how independent producers were able to find funding for Broadway and off-Broadway shows. We educated ourselves in every aspect. Music is magical and all my life as an artist, but it’s most of all a business. We put all our hearts and soul and we were able to make it happen. Then I was lucky and blessed that the show was embraced by so many PBS stations around the US. I love the United States. So many people love the arts and love dreamers like me. Their help and their monetary support made it all possible for me. It was an amazing experience; we are ready to do it again. Nothing worth having comes easy and so was filming the PBS special. But it was for sure worth the hard work. 

You’re also a blogger! How did you get started blogging and what do you enjoy the most about it? 

I love to share all the beautiful things I experience and see. I like to blog about my travels, about my passion for food. And I love to share tips for traveling to Italy. I was born and raised in Venice, Italy, and I love to share tips, legends and more about Venice. Where to eat and what to do. I want people to enjoy Italy like an Italian. I too often see tourists getting lost in maps and getting tired following tourist guides around Venice or all of Italy as a matter of fact. They miss the beauty all around them. I love my country – one of the reasons that I also organize once a year a trip to Italy with fans and friends. They get to experience Italy like an Italian. With an Italian. The trip includes wine tastings, cooking classes, exclusive visits to special places they can get to see only with me and of course also two concerts in some special venues. I love to share all of this with them. Those trips are unforgettable. Next year I will be organizing the trip with Perillo Tours. I love to work with them so my guests can be helped to stay longer in Italy if they want and be helped with any change they want to do after the 10 days trip with me. And, of course, I love to blog also about this. 

It seems like you’re an artist who has always known exactly what you want – how did you persevere through the challenges that come with being an artist, as well as challenges that life has thrown your way? 

I always knew that I wanted to be a singer. And that’s because one of the things I always pursued in my life was “happiness.” Nothing like music and singing makes me happy. Being an artist is not an easy thing. You are putting yourself out there to be judged. Being an artist is a lot of hard work. Not so fancy on the day to day basis. But no matter how hard it is, the passion and the love for music makes us artists overcome any kind of difficulty. My idol, Edith Piaf, used to say “Singing is a way of escaping. It’s another world. I’m no longer on earth.” This feeling is the force for any artist to go on no matter what the world puts on us. Love for music and singing is one of the most powerful and empowering things for me.

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