Il Cielo In Una Stanza

The Sky In A Room

Songwriter: Gino Paoli

Original performer: Mina

Written by Gino Paoli in 1960, this was the first original song to reach a large audience, thereby opening the way to the legendary 1960s. Il cielo in una stanza – The Sky In a Room was at the top of the charts both with Paoli’s version and with Mina’s (15 weeks), who that year proved herself with eight singles in the top 20. While Paoli's version is a listless, and cynically intimate classic, in a spoken style that goes against the conventions of bel canto, Mina's is an intense masterpiece of interpretation, one of the all-time great moments in Italian song. The words, instead of slipping away with resignation, are taken to heart for their semantic value and pronounced with emphasis, almost as if she didn’t want to let them go. While Paoli is legendary for saying things without frills, Mina is romantic, saying them with passion. Mina later recorded it in English (then recorded by Connie Francis), French, German and Spanish. In 1977, the song was back in the charts in the version by Franco Simone.