Since the song was recorded by various people, it may have been folk processed by the people who sang it. Also, it's possible that different singers came from different traditions with different dialects, and sang certain words as they would be pronounced in whatever dialect they knew best.

I guess the "official" version would be the original sheet music but that isn't available to us. Or, the very first recording of the song, whenever that was. It's possible that each of the versions given above is pretty close to whatever source the transcriber or translator was using, even though they are all different.

It's also possible that people from different areas may have different meanings for some of the words in the song. Dad said "Mulignan'" meant eggplant, for example. He had no doubt about it and I think he said it was the same in Neapolitan (or at least in Teorese, his village dialect). He told me it was equivalent to the Italian word "melanzane."

The version posted by Frank agrees with the Lou Monte record we had.

Rita F