The Story
It was June 5, 1955 when the era of La Bussola by Sergio Bernardini began in the Focette area of Marina di Pietrasanta, a brilliant showman who received the rent of the place from the then owner Alpo Benelli as a Christmas gift in 1954.
For the opening night, Renato Carosone and his orchestra were called, hired not without difficulty. In fact, to convince the artist that from that moment on he would be inextricably linked to the place, Bernardini had to raise the fee from the 90 thousand lire initially proposed to 160 thousand.
Never was a more appropriate choice: from that moment La Bussola became a style icon, a meeting point not only for VIPs but also for old and new rich people in Italy in full economic boom. In the span of a decade practically all the protagonists of Italian and international light music performed on stage: from Louis Armstrong to Platters, from Neil Sedaka to Adriano Celentano, from Peppino Di Capri to Don Marino Barreto jr, to Milva, Ella Fitzgerald, Domenico Modugno and many others.
It is always thanks to Bernardini’s intuition that on the stage of La Bussola Mina Mazzini becomes simply Mina: she who was first a spectator at La Bussola, began to perform almost as a game for friends, until her consecration as an internationally renowned artist.
December 31, 1968 sees one of the darkest chapters in the place. During the student demonstrations that raged in those years La Bussola di Focette was targeted on New Year’s Eve in which Fred Bongusto and Shirley Bassey were supposed to perform, generating during the clashes a wounded who will remain paralyzed.
La Bussola di Focette saw a notable development until August 2007, when it was closed due to nocturnal noise and then resurrected in September of the same year under a new name: Bussola Versilia
