Gino Paoli is a cantautore of the first generation belonging to the important group of the so called “Scuola Genovese.” (Genoese school). He is considered a founder of the Italian songwriter tradition. His songs, almost always focusing on the theme of love, separate him from the dominant vision of the woman and of love traditionally crowned in marriage.
Paoli was born in Monfalcone, in the north-eastern region of Friuli Venezia-Giulia, on September 23, 1934. His father, Aldo, was a naval engineer from Campiglia Marittima (near Livorno, Tuscany), while his mother, Rina, hailed from an affluent family of the Venezia-Giulia region. She was a pianist and passed on her love for music to the young Gino. Rina’s side of the family was involved in the forced migration from the areas of Venezia-Giulia and Dalmatia during WWII. Some fell victims to ethnic cleansing by Yugoslavian partisans in the foibe massacres.
A few months after the end of the war, the Paolis moved to the residential Genovese neighborhood of Pegli. The Ligurian city would become Gino’s true home town.
In 1952 an eighteen-year-old Gino Paoli moved to a small attic apartment in the neighboring mariners’ village of Boccadasse with his cat Ciacola (‘chat’ in Venetian dialect), who would become the protagonist of the 1960 hit “La gatta,” a song whose lyrics were written by Giulio Rapetti, soon to become famous for authoring the lyrics of Lucio Battisti’s songs under the name “Mogol”. In Genoa he made friends with important musicians and songwriters: Luigi Tenco, Bruno Lauzi, Fabrizio De André, Umberto Bindi, Joe Sentieri, Giorgio Calabrese, Gian Piero Reverberi and Gianfranco Reverberi. With Tenco, Lauzi and others Paoli founded a rock band named “I Diavoli del Rock,” and in 1959 he married Anna Fabbri, whom he had met in a rock ’n roll dance contest. After this rock beginning, Paoli went solo and returned to a more melodic style close to that of the French chansonniers. He listened to and collaborated with francophone songwriters such as George Brassens, Boris Vian, Jacques Brel, Marcel Mouloudji and Charles Aznavour. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Paoli’s songs become the soundtrack of Italy’s new society: during the years of economic growth which transformed a poor agricultural country into an industrial economic power, Gino Paoli recorded several hits for the Ricordi music label: “Il cielo in una stanza” (1959), “La gatta” (1960, with lyrics by Mogol), “Senza fine” (1961), “Sapore di sale” (1963), “Che cosa c’è” (1963). He also wrote for other singers: Italy’s most famous female artists such as Ornella Vanoni and Mina imbued Paoli’s tunes and lyrics with the vocal quality that consecrated Gino as a founding father of the Italian songwriter tradition.
The year 1962 marked the beginning of a series of life-changing events: he fell in love with young actress Stefania Sandrelli and in 1964 had a child with her while divorcing Anna Fabbri. In 1962, while driving his Giulietta Spider, Paoli was involved in a serious car accident in which his friend and guitarist Victor Van der Faber died. Paoli was distraught and would fall into depression lasting many years, eventually attempting suicide in 1963. Paoli would later comment: “it was a deliberate, self-aware act. I was convinced there was nothing left to live for, my song ‘Sapore di sale’ was playing everywhere, I was very famous, the man of the day. It was a fear of boredom, a fear of endless repetition. I had money, women, what more could I wish for? […] Suicide is the only means to choose: you don’t get to choose the really important things in life such as being born, falling in love, dying. Suicide is the only arrogant way that man can decide for himself.”
In 1961 and 1964 he participated in the Festival di Sanremo, and again in 1966, but at this point his golden star seems to be in decline. After receiving minor injuries in a car accident in 1965, he moved to Levanto on the Ligurian coast in 1968, where he opened a music bar and hosted performances by several musician friends. Paoli did not recognize himself in the political songs that permeated Italy during these years. He continued to write about love, but in a way that challenges the dominant views of women as moral beings. After a few years’ silence, he recorded a trilogy of music albums in 1971 and became politically active. Paoli would become a member of Italy’s parliament until 1992.
A new wave of success would come in the 1980s thanks to the women of his life: in 1984 he wrote the soundtrack for Paolo Quaregna’s Una donna allo specchio, featuring Stefania Sandrelli, and in 1985 he went on tour with Ornella Vanoni. In 1991 “Quattro amici al bar” dominated the hit parade, and with his daughter Amanda Sandrelli he recorded “La bella e la bestia,” the Italian language soundtrack to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
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Bibliography
Ornella Vanoni, Gino Paoli, Enrico De Angelis, Noi due, una lunga storia, Milan, Mondadori, 2004.
http://www.ginopaoli.it/ginopaoli/biografia.asp
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gino_Paoli
https://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2005/12_Dicembre/21/paoli.shtml
“Well… when someone wakes up in the morning and writes ‘Il cielo in una stanza,’ they don’t have to do anything else in life. Because they’ve already done it all.” Enzo told me this with conviction.
Jannacci considered Gino Paoli the greatest of them all, and in Jannacci’s hyperbole, the author of “Il cielo in una stanza” should have stopped after composing that masterpiece. “Because he wrote the most beautiful song ever.” Yet we’ve been treated to handfuls of other masterpieces by Paoli, from “Che cosa c’è” to “Sapore di sale,” from “Senza fine” to “Quattro amici.” From “Due ombre lunghe” to “Come si fa” (had you forgotten these last two?). And I could go on and on.
But good old Enzo loved to go overboard, and sometimes he’d even forget—or alter—his best ideas. So over time, he stuck to the concept, changing the song. We didn’t say anything to him because the new version was even better. This happened: one day he said out of the blue: “Paoli? Someone who writes in 1960, ‘Stones worn away by the sea are my words of love for you,’ doesn’t need to write anything else in his life… Stones worn away like words… of love… Genius.” Jannacci was right. Paoli was a genius. Except that it seems Paoli had written “Sassi” a few weeks before “Il cielo in una stanza.” So if that’s the case, Paoli could never have written “Il cielo in una stanza.” And we would never have heard it. Oh well.
Well. I deliberately left out “La gatta,” a true revolution—starting with the lyrics—in Italian song. That one is also from 1960. It was his first recorded song, I believe. Right after that, he released “Il cielo in una stanza.” And then “Sassi” (which he had written between “Gatta” and “Cielo”).
My dad, even though he belonged to a social circle fairly close to the world of intellectuals, loved “frivolous” things very much, including pop songs, boxing, soccer and Inter, Jerome Klapka Jerome, the Six Days of Milan cycling race—all passions he had tried to pass on to me. One day, when I was ten years old—my father wasn’t home—I heard, at the end of a news broadcast, a report on the Six-Day Race: naturally, thinking of my father, I paid close attention: It was a report that discussed not only bicycles but also a young singer from Genoa who wrote his own songs and who was set to perform that evening at the musical show tied to the cycling race at the Vigorelli Velodrome. This Gino Paoli. And they played the song he was going to sing: “La gatta.” A brief interview followed. Well, that love song for a cat, that somewhat strange, almost hoarse voice, left a lasting impression on me. I admit it, I grew up dreaming of the “black spot on her face” and the “old attic near the sea.” Years later—not many—wandering as a pre-teen in the evenings betwe , and Marittima (my last vacation on the Adriatic before moving to the Ligurian coast), I stumbled upon Gino Paoli and his band. He was playing at a dance hall every night. It was an amazing opportunity: from up on the street, I could see and hear him, small but not so far away. And the music sounded great. Needless to say, I was there every night from ten to midnight. And to think I’d imagined him on endless tours around the world. He was right there for me, naturally unaware that he was giving me what would become my love for singer-songwriter music. I spent the following summers in Sestri Levante. Meanwhile, Paoli had finally become very, very, very famous and came a couple of times every summer to the “Piscina ai Castelli” in Sestri, the trendiest spot of those years. It cost a fortune. In short, I never saw him perform live as a paying member of the audience. Goodness, where would I have gotten the money? Better that way; I don’t know if I could have handled the emotion… I later met Gino Paoli a couple of times at Club Tenco and once as a guest on one of our shows. But by then I had lost the magic of being able to listen to him and applaud him as a fan. The encounters were cordial and professional, partly because I couldn’t have expected more: I had never had the courage to write to him or tell him what I’ve written here today.
Today everyone is writing everything about Gino Paoli. About how much whiskey he drank in his life, what kind of politician he was when he was elected, how many women he fell in love with and how many he made fall in love with him . But above all, what women! Aside from his wife Anna Fabbri, the long-standing partner of the first part of Gino’s life, and his second wife Paola Penzo, who stayed by his side until the end—one need only think of Ornella Vanoni and Stefania Sandrelli. ‘His’ women never abandoned him. Some friends tell me: ‘But deep down, he wasn’t very likable…’ Exactly: I picture him as introverted, gruff, withdrawn, lonely, and at times depressed. But in love. Always. And that is worth everything else. He wrote almost all of the most beautiful Italian love songs. He did not stop there. With skillful sensitivity, he approached the great French chanson d’auteur on equal footing. He translated the untranslatable: how do you translate Jacques Brel? He succeeded because, in life, he was also Jacques Brel. I believe that only Gino Paoli had the courage to write one of the most heart-wrenching verses of “Ne me quitte pas” in Italian. “Don’t go away./ I won’t cry anymore, I won’t speak anymore./ I’ll hide and watch you when you laugh./ And I’ll listen to you when you sing./ I’ll be just the shadow of your shadow,/ the shadow of your hand./ The shadow of your dog./ Don’t go away….”
The shadow of your dog.
Whenever Paoli came up in conversation—and his friend Gino Paoli was often mentioned, as I’m sure you can imagine, along with his apparent reluctance to embrace cheerfulness and joy—the cardiologist Jannacci would say: “…he’s a guy walking around with a bullet just an inch from his heart… If you were in his shoes, would you be so cheerful?” Paoli, I believe due to a heartbreak (I like to think so), shot himself in the heart and failed to die; perhaps, as they say in such cases, he didn’t want to die completely. The bullet stopped just a few centimeters from its target. It was so close that they couldn’t extract it. Inoperable. So Paoli always traveled with his life-sustaining bullet between flesh and soul, between light and darkness. An uncomfortable figure, extreme in some ways, for his time. “Vivere ancora” was written by Paoli the year after his attempted suicide. It was part of the soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Before the Revolution. It was 1963. And, to give a sense of that era in Italy, consider this: the line “close together, embracing amidst the sheets” was censored from the song and replaced with “close together, embracing, eyes locked in eyes.” “Sapore di sale” is also from 1963. He recorded it with an arrangement by Maestro Ennio Morricone. Gato Barbieri on tenor sax. Just saying.
I return to my memories.
Thank you, Gino Paoli, for what you’ve given me in life. Oh, I agree, no drama: at 91, you can say goodbye and go. You loved and were loved deeply. You told the story of love. You made me fall in love with love. You sang of the extraordinary nature of the ordinary. What is the line I always remember? The line that has hidden itself in a little corner of my memory (and my heart)? There are two or three; some of his lesser-known verses: “In a cafè / with rude waiters/ for the first time we loved each other./ In a café without even ashtrays/ Above the cups of poorly made coffee/ what matters to us was born.” Year 1961. Trivial? Not at all. The extraordinary nature of normality, precisely.
