Giovanni Zarrella was born in 1978 in Hechingen, in southern Germany, to Italian parents, and grew up switching between German and Italian at home. He first got famous in 2001 as a singer in Bro'Sis, the band put together on the TV casting show Popstars, whose single "I Believe" went to number one in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
After the band split in 2006 he spent years mostly on television, then came back to music in 2019 with "La vita è bella", an album sung entirely in Italian that reached the top 10 in all three countries and went platinum several times over. Since 2021 he has hosted his own music show on German TV, Die Giovanni Zarrella Show.