Maria Elena “Melli” Dorèlli grew up in the rooms above her family’s trattoria in Sirolo, on the Conero coast, where the cliffs drop straight into the Adriatic. The summers belonged to other people’s holidays. The winters belonged to the town.
She wasn’t a prodigy. She was the kid who tapped rhythms on the pew during Mass until her mother pinched her. The kitchen taught her timing first — dinner service has a tempo, and everyone downstairs knew the count.
Everything turned the winter she was twelve, when she hauled a box of her uncle Tonino’s records out of the damp cellar: warped italo-disco, a few battered twelve-inches, a Moroder sleeve half-eaten by mice. Half of them skipped. She played them until the needle gave out.
For years she DJ’d anything that would have her — weddings, a cousin’s baptism, the August festa where the speakers always blew at midnight. Then she saved up, moved inland to Bologna, and spent her twenties learning to actually build the songs instead of only playing them.
After her 2025 debut Disco Dorèlli came Italia: a love letter home, released one song a day.
About the merch
Everything here is printed on demand, so nothing sits in a warehouse waiting to be thrown away. The tees are Comfort Colors 1717 — garment-dyed heavyweight cotton, 6.1 oz, dyed after it’s sewn, which is why no two are quite the same shade. The all-over pieces are sublimated: the colour sits in the fibre instead of on top of it, so it can’t crack or peel.
Four eras, one riviera. Pick your side.