Italy was represented by Claudio Villa, with the song '"Addio, addio", at the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest, which took place on 18 March in Luxembourg City. Broadcaster RAI chose the winning song from the 1962 Sanremo Music Festival as their Eurovision entry: the song had been performed twice at Sanremo and Villa was chosen over former two-time Italian representative Domenico Modugno as the performer, even though Modugno was the composer of the music for the song.

On the night of the final Villa performed 15th in the running order, following Luxembourg and preceding Monaco. The song was a dramatic ballad in the style for which Italy had become known, with Villa giving an impassioned performance. In 1962, a ranking system was introduced into the voting for the first time with each national jury awarding 3-2-1 to its top 3 songs. A by-product of this system which became immediately apparent was that with 15 songs competing for each jury's votes, a majority of songs were likely to score very few points, if any. At the close of the voting "Addio, addio" had received only 3 points (2 from Luxembourg and 1 from Yugoslavia), but this was enough to place Italy a quite respectable-looking 9th of the 16 entries. The Italian jury awarded its 3 points to Yugoslavia.

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