Rosa "Rosita" Melo

Rosita Melo, as Rosa Clotilde Melo was more commonly known, was born on the 9^th of July 1897 in Montevideo, Uruguay, to the tailor Michele Melo and Rosa Maria Luciano, both of whom had emigrated from the port of Naples in search of a better future.

Rosita lived in the Uruguayan capital until her family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, when she was still a child.

Her parents, in their house on Calle Estados Unidos, decide to buy a piano and, in 1905, Rosita was already enrolled at the “Thibaud-Piazzini” Conservatory. When she graduated from the Conservatory, she became a piano teacher, but not before composing “Desde el alma”, one of the world's best-known waltzes, in 1911.

The move to the Flores neighbourhood was her real turning point: here she met artists such as the poetess Alfonsina Storni and the writer and Secretary to the Minister of Finance Domingo Salaberry, Victor Piuma Velez, her future husband. The two were married on the 23^rd of February 1922 and had their first child, who unfortunately died shortly after birth.

The couple moved from Buenos Aire to Ramos Meija, where they had two daughters, Hebe Lia in 1926 and Emilce Susana in 1935.

In 1948, she accepted director Homero Manzi's proposal to make “Desde el Alma” the soundtrack of the film “Pobre mi madre querida”, taking the song to its greatest fame.

Honoured by the Sociedad Argentina de Auctores y Compositores de Musica, Rosita Melo dies on the 12^th of August 1981, shortly after her husband, with whom she was laid to rest in the Cementerio de la Chacarita in Buenos Aires, at the Rincòn de los Notables, where the famous are buried.