Cani, gatti e altri animali playlist

Cats, dogs and other animals

Animals have always been found in songs, often as symbols connected to love stories. We need only recall how many times the swallow – sometimes in the guise of a wanderer or without a nest, at others as a stranger or foreigner – has symbolized the beloved woman who has left, never to return. This playlist includes swallows, but also parrots, horses, giraffes, donkeys, cats, dogs and lions; they appear in the widest array of situations, from Rodolfo De Angelis’s surreal little she-dog to the donkey and horse at the centre of the moral tale sung by Crivel in the manner of Aesop, the storyteller of ancient Greece. After all, each of these songs has a fairy-tale element, a perfect way of capturing the gestures of animals without turning them into humans as in Disney films, even if they are at times accomplices of humans. To close this list, we present a very well-known instrumental piece that simulates a cat walking over a piano keyboard, as it plays with the sound made by its paws on the black and white keys. This is ‘Il gattino sulla tastiera’ (which was originally titled ‘Kitten on the Keys’, composed in 1921 by the American Zez Confrey); here Renato Carosone gives an example of his great skill at the piano.