Toto Cutugno, the singer whose cliche-ridden but irresistibly catchy L’Italiano defined ideas of Italian culture to millions of listeners across Europe and Russia, has died at Milan’s San Raffaelle hospital aged 80, writes The Guardian.

Born Salvatore Cutugno to Sicilian parents in Tuscany, the singer was for a decade a regular at the Sanremo music festival, the Italian institution that served as inspiration for the Eurovision song contest.

He won the contest in 1980 with Solo Noi but finished in second place six times, winning him a reputation as Sanremo’s eternal runner-up.

Reinterpreted by the French singer Dalida as Monday Tuesday … Laissez moi danser, Cutugno’s 1979 song Voglio l’anima became one of biggest hits of the disco period in France. He won Eurovision in 1990, with a hymn to the foundation of the European Union two years later: “Together, unite, unite, Europe”, he sang in Insieme: 1992.

But his greatest success was 1983’s L’Italiano, a song the newspaper Corriere Della Sera described as the “Christian Democrats of canzone”, selling millions of records even though no one would confess to listening to it.