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.