The presenters were the two Italian winners of the Eurovision song contest; Gigliola Cinquetti who won in 1964, and Toto Cutugno who won in 1990. The problem was that nobody had asked them if they could speak English or French, as a consequence the entire contest was presented in Italian which was very inappropriate as most viewers were non-Italians and did not understand a word of what they said. A little bit of chaos also happened during the voting when scrutineer Frank Naeff had to help Cutugno several times because of the many times he didn't understand which country was getting which amount of points from each jury.
There were two tied countries in the first position. Both Sweden and France got 146 points each. However, after 1969, when there were four winners, tie-breaking rules had been introduced so that there could only be one winner each year. As stated by the rules that govern the voting since 1975, the voting scrutineer, Frank Naeff, examined the amount of individual scores each country had received to decide the winner. Both France and Sweden had received 12 points four times each. However Sweden had received 10 points five times, while France had only received that score twice, and therefore, Sweden was declared the sole winner.
Originally, this song contest was to be made in the city of Sanremo, where the popular Sanremo Song Contest is held since 1951. However, the outburst of the Gulf War forced the cancellation of these plans for security reasons. The contest was on the verge of being canceled altogether because of the war, but in the eleventh hour it was decided to move the organization to the safer capital of Italy, Rome, using as venue the renowned Cinecittà Studios, the same place where films like Ben-Hur (1959) or Quo Vadis (1951) had been filmed. The postcards, however, still reminded of the original planned venue, Sanremo, as they had flowers as leitmotif and artists performed snippets of Italian hit songs, many of them Sanremo hits.