Drusian in that period competed with numerous victories in musical competitions in Veneto and Friuli–Venezia Giulia; Ricci was the singer and keyboardist of a group called Vox Populi, with whom he had released a maxi-single entitled "I'm So Bad" and presented himself as a songwriter to the record companies.
The poet Younis Tawfik later revealed jalisse (جليس jalīs) in Arabic means "diner who knows how to entertain in the tale of fables and music: sit and listen".
In 1997 they participated again at the Festival, once again by right, thanks to the rule, introduced two years before and present for the last time, which allowed the non-winning finalists of the "New Proposals" section of the previous edition to compete for 4 places among the "Champions".
The result in terms of sales (50,000 copies) was below expectations, but due to the fact that the two had reached the Sanremo victory as unknown artists and with an unreleased album.
Two months later they took part in the Eurovision Song Contest 1997 in Dublin with the same song, reaching the fourth place; there were speculations of boycott from the national broadcaster RAI, which revamped in 2009 when Gigi Vesigna, in his book Vox Populi, stated that the defeat of Jalisse at the event had been driven by RAI: if the duo had won, the Italian public TV would have had to organize the 1998 edition, an operation deemed commercially disadvantageous given the scarce interest of the Italian audience for this event.
In the meantime, Ricci decided to leave the vocal parts of the songs to his wife and devoted himself to their small independent label, the Tregatti Produzioni Musicali.
The pair also took part in the selections for the Sanremo Music Festival 2007, but their song "Linguaggio universale" ("Universal Language"), inspired by an essay by the Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi-Montalcini, was rejected.
In September 2007, they released the album Linguaggio universale attached to the book Istruzione, chiave dello sviluppo by the Rita Levi-Montalcini Foundation, published by Baldini & Castoldi.