This was followed by European hit singles like "Una notte speciale", "Messaggio", "Chan-son Egocentrique", "Prospettiva Nevski" and "Nomadi" and albums like Gioielli rubati, Park Hotel, Elisir, and Il sole nella pioggia which charted in Continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Japan.

In her more recent career Alice has explored a diverse range of musical genres including classical, jazz, electronica and ambient, and has collaborated with a large number of renowned English and American musicians.

In 1975 she quit her day job at a design studio and took the stage name Alice Visconti as she was signed by the Italian subsidiary of CBS Records and released her debut album La mia poca grande età.

In late 1979, shortly after her contract with CBS had expired, Alice met a man with whom she would go on to collaborate with for the next three decades with great success, the experimental, unconventional and highly productive composer and singer Franco Battiato who was just on the verge of having his Italian breakthrough in the pop genre with the album L'era del cinghiale bianco, released in 1979.

Battiato secured Alice a contract with his label EMI and the two began working together with his producer Angelo Carrara on what was to become her first proper hit single, the dark and despairing "Il vento caldo dell'estate" ("The Warm Summer Wind") and the following album Capo Nord ("North Cape").

Both produced by Angelo Carrara, the albums spun off further popular single releases like "Messaggio" ("Message"), the nonsensical French/Italian/German/English language "Chan-son Egocentrique" ("Selfcentred Song", a duet with Battiato), "A cosa pensano" ("What Are They Thinking"), "Notte a Roma" ("Night in Rome"), "Solo un'idea" ("Just a Thought") and "Il profumo del silenzio" ("The Scent of Silence").

These became especially successful in West Germany, which led to her recording the German/Italian language duet "Zu nah am Feuer" with singer Stefan Waggershausen in late 1983, an English/Italian version was later also released in certain territories under the title "Close to the Fire".

Despite being tipped to win and arguably the best reception from the audiences on the night as well as receiving the coveted "twelve points", the full mark, from countries as diverse as Spain and Finland, Alice and Battiato lost out to the Swedish song "Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley", and finished 5th out of 19 entries.

The album was notably different from the preceding "I treni di Tozeur" and Gioielli rubati, as it mainly focussed on blues-tinged, melancholy and suggestive ballads with airy soundscapes giving plenty of room for the musicians to display their respective talents and for Bissi to use her vocal skills in a new musical environment.

Musically and vocally versatile and unwilling to be categorised or defined, 1988 saw Bissi setting out on a low-key tour in smaller venues and classical concert halls in Italy and Switzerland accompanied solely by herself and Michele Fedrigotti on pianos and keyboards, performing not her pop hits but arias and lieder by fin de siècle composers Gabriel Fauré, Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel.

In 1989 Bissi returned with another pop album, Il sole nella pioggia (The Sun in the Rain), which was proof of further musical development and evolution as it was clearly influenced by contemporary British artists in the experimental and alternative rock genres such as Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and David Sylvian and among the all-star line up of musicians contributing to the project were in fact several who previously had collaborated with these: drummer Steve Jansen and keyboardist Richard Barbieri, guitarist Dave Gregory, trumpetist and multi-instrumentalist Jon Hassell, Turkish flutist Kudsi Erguner as well as the Italian trumpet and flugelhorn jazz player Paolo Fresu.

Side two of the original vinyl album however opened with a multilayered a cappella interpretation of the medieval French folk song "Orléans" on which Alice again showed her vocal capability by singing all harmonies covering four octaves, followed by the acoustic "Anìn A Grîs" sung in the Friulian language.

Il sole nella pioggia also included a reworking of the track "Le scogliere di Dover", originally released on the Japanese Kusamakura album, provided with new lyrics and retitled "I cieli del nord" ("The Skies of the North").

After a three-year absence from the music scene Bissi returned with the album Mezzogiorno sulle Alpi ("Noon in the Alps") in 1992, her most experimental and mature work to date, again recorded with a number of distinguished international musicians such as Steve Jansen, Richard Barbieri, Dave Gregory, Paolo Fresu as well as double bass player Danny Thompson, drummer Gavin Harrison and bassist Jakko Jakszyk.

Mezzogiorno sulle Alpi displayed Bissi's effort to steer away from being a commercially oriented Mediterranean pop act to a much more ambitious performer and marked an increasing expansion into electronics, expressed in colourful synth sounds, occasional drum loops and subdued ambient passages as well as influences from contemporary jazz.

The years 1993 and 1994 saw Bissi embarking on the tour project Art et Décoration with the Arturo Toscanini Symphony Orchestra, interpreting works by composers such as Reynaldo Hahn, Charles Ives, Maurice Ravel, Xavier Montsalvatge, Geni Sadero, Gabriel Fauré, Ivor Gurney, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Heitor Villa-Lobos.

[3] The album spawned three single releases, "I Am a Taxi", "Dimmi di sì" ("Tell me yes") and "Open Your Eyes", an English/Italian language R&B duet with Skye Edwards, lead singer of British trip hop band Morcheeba.

God Is My DJ, which also was recorded and released by Warner Music, comprised works by composers as diverse as Arvo Pärt, David Crosby, Popol Vuh, Eleni Karaindrou, Gavin Bryars, Franco Battiato and Jane Siberry, French, Hungarian and Livonian traditionals, as well as 11th and 14th century hymns sung in Ancient Greek and Latin.

The song she performed, Juri Camisasca's "Il giorno dell'indipendenza" ("The Day of Independence"), qualified for the finals and finished in an honourable ninth place and was also the opening track on the career retrospective Personal Jukebox.

[4] In recent years Bissi has periodically toured with the project Lungo La Strada (Along the Road) with Steve Jansen, Marco Pancaldi and Alberto Tafuri, performing in both classical auditoriums, churches and concert halls in Italy.

[5] After the comparatively low sales of albums Mélodie Passagère – Alice Canta Satie, Fauré & Ravel (1988) and Mezzogiorno Sulle Alpi (1992) the EMI label declined to release or even record the 1993/1994 project Art et Décoration with the Arturo Toscanini Symphony Orchestra.