Ciao, er, Turin? Tokyo? Where am I tonight?

“Ciao Italia: Live From Italy“, right?

Well, bits of it! If any of you thought the ‘Confessions Tour‘ DVD was an obvious mish-mash of more than one show in London, it was nothing compared to the collage of recordings that made up Madonna’s second live tour video!

Supposedly made up of a single night in Turin, the ebullient ‘Ciao Torino‘ call at the start of the show sets out where we, the audience are, despite many of the shots actually being from a second Italian concert in Florence. However, the opening montage of soundcheck images is actually taken from Tokyo. This is quite easily spottable in the fact that the Japanese audience had benches will set seat numbers, whereas the European stadium shows were general admission, generating the many sweaty Italians crushed up against the stage.

Audience shots feature heavily throughout the recording and frequently those sweaty olive skinned Italians look decidedly Japanese…

Then there is the matter of her choice of jewellery for the show. Making identification of the two Italian shows easy, one night she wore a sparkly necklace, and the other she went bare. ‘Lucky Star‘ makes it particularly easy to spot this as you can play ‘now you see it, now you don’t‘ almost in alternate shots throughout the song:

Now you see it …now you don’t!

Moving onto the middle section of the show and we have her amazing colour changing trousers… not so easy to spot this one, so you gotta be quick to catch when her trousers go from the black that matches her bustier, to when they are gold to match her jacket

Heading towards the end of the show we have the most obvious example of the switching between the shows – her hair! And it’s not just due to the multitude of combs which are thrown on stage… first we have ‘True Blue‘ album cover type hair, and then we have the ‘slicked back with a ton of sweat/gel/water’ look

To be fair, whilst this is all amusing and amazing it got past Madonna’s perfectionism, it really is for the best. Bootlegs of the individual Italian shows which the live show was pieced together from, prove they did take the best live vocals for each song which featured on the eventual release.

To see the full Tokyo show, featuring a very sprightly Madonna performing the show afresh – you could try and track down the Japan-only released ‘Madonna – Live In Japan‘ release which came out independent of ‘Ciao Italia‘ on Video and Laser Disc.

Thanks to TP for the inspiration, and to FlyingDutchmanIAm for first pointing this out to me, via an article in Record Collector mag about 15 years ago!