Mina (Anna Maria Mazzini) is without doubt the most significant popular music performer in Italy over the period from the late 1950s to today. Still active as a recording artist in her eighties, she has neither sung in public nor been seen on television for well over 20 years. In her heyday, she was an innovative, indeed disruptive, figure who was a part of the wave of youth-oriented music that provided the soundtrack to the 1960s. She broke with traditional styles in vocal performance and in popular music stardom. She had numerous hit records, appeared in films and went on to host a series of highly successful television variety shows. Even after she withdrew from view, her annual album releases were snapped up by her numerous fans and went straight to the top of the sales charts. As good as unknown in the English-speaking world, Mina is an example of a performer whose many meanings can only be investigated in relation to the national context that spawned her and brought her lasting fame. This is acknowledged by Rachel Haworth in this extremely well-researched and well-informed volume that is centred squarely on Mina's star persona and its genesis, evolution and impact within her home country.

For those with an interest in Italian culture or Italian popular entertainment and music, this book will be a very welcome addition in an area that is, perhaps surprisingly, under-researched. Given Italy's strong association with music, it might be expected that popular song would be a key sub-field of Italian cultural studies. In fact, this is not the case and Haworth is one of only a handful of scholars to have made this her specialism. Indeed, she can be regarded as the pioneer and a leading expert in the field. Even in Italy, it must be said, most serious writing about popular music is conducted outside the academy by journalists and freelance authors. The reason for this marginalisation has nothing to do with the music itself, although there are many in Italy who do not conceal their preference for American and British sounds over domestic products, and everything to do with the way some cultural forms and media acquire legitimacy as objects of study while others struggle to gain the same recognition.

The Many Meanings of Mina goes a long way towards showing why popular music and its key performers merit attention from scholars of cultural history and cultural studies. Haworth does not provide a musicological study; rather she draws on star studies and cultural history to identify the way Mina was a crucial figure in the rapid modernisation that occurred as Italy transitioned from a predominantly rural society to a modern industrial one. She was one of a group of young singers who revolutionised the provincial melodic tradition by introducing new rhythms, cadences and expressive modes. Their style was seen by cultural conservatives more as shouting than singing (indeed this led them to be dubbed ‘urlatori’). This departure from a tradition that was consolidated in the immediate postwar years and which was enshrined in the Sanremo music festival was enormously controversial between the late 1950s and early 1960s. To cap matters, Mina was also a provocative personality who became a mother out of wedlock and generally refused to kowtow to dominant expectations of female behaviour. Her rebelliousness may have been disconcerting to the establishment, but it was in tune with the social and cultural ruptures that saw the emergence of youth culture, changes in patterns of leisure and consumption and a general widening of cultural horizons. Mina's fame was extended by appearances in a number of popular films, sometimes as a musical guest artist, at other times as the female lead whose character's name was sometimes the same as her own. This intermediality subsequently extended to television light entertainment and advertising, turning Mina into one of the most instantly recognisable and ubiquitous personalities of the 1960s and 1970s. In the end, it might be said that Mina was domesticated; her disruptive qualities were tamed and softened as she became institutionalised within the highly controlled context of state broadcasting. Haworth acknowledges this while also making the acute observation that Italian modernisation witnessed many compromises and hybridities of modernity and tradition: innovation was not usually rejected outright; rather it was moulded and accommodated, ultimately leading to new national cultural configurations that blended old and new. If Mina became a national treasure (Haworth deploys this term), it was surely due to her great talent, her vocal mastery, her choice of songwriters and her engaging performative personality. However, it was also because she symbolised for at least two generations of Italians the transformations of the postwar era.

This book is organised in terms of chapters that reflect a keen methodological awareness and also a desire to connect the subject matter with current debates and themes of study within cultural studies. The topics of analysis, beyond music and cinema, are scandal, television stardom, Mina's uses in advertising, her changing image on album covers and her absent–presence in present-day Italian culture. All of these are eminently transferable investigations. In consequence, the question that a potential reader of this book without a professional interest in Italy might have in mind – ‘Is this going to have anything to offer me?’ – can be resoundingly answered in the positive on account of the choice of themes and topics. The Many Meanings of Mina is a profoundly innovative and relevant book that deserves to command attention well beyond the confines of Italian studies.