Gino Paoli
L'Ufficio Delle Cose Perdute

"The woman I love is my mistress, is my mother, is my dog, is my whore": this is what Paoli sang in a 1974 record, "I Semafori Rossi Non Sono Dio".

The Genoese singer-songwriter brought an enormous renewal in Italian music; unlike many of his contemporary colleagues, he began to sing about love relationships in an extremely new, "political" way, I'd say, because someone who, in the middle of feminism, comes out with such a statement (which I find so true, total) is making politics and much more than any random singer-songwriter invoking revolution, because Paoli doesn't invoke revolution, he simply makes it: "Il Cielo In Una Stanza" is the love song that a brothel customer dedicates to a prostitute after the act, in the manner of a "Via Del Campo" by De André, except the latter is from 1968, the first is from 1960, if you know what I mean.

His extremely independent and free attitude, which he has always expressed in his songs, regardless of the theme, touched my heart from the first time I listened to him: his lyrics have always been literally poetry in music, the melodies exciting and engaging, and his voice increasingly deeper, mature and expressive as the years went by, so much so that, by his own admission, he gave his best in interpretation as an old man, not as a young man, just compare any of his pieces from the '60s and '70s with another from the '80s onwards.

I met him at a concert years ago, shook his hand, complimented him, and after a funny moment where a journalist asked, seeing him embrace Stefania Sandrelli, "Can I take a photo?" And he replied something like "it's a bit of a pain in the ass but okay", I had a strange feeling; I was in front of a gentleman who, beyond the evident years he carried on his shoulders, had a smile and a light in his eyes like a twenty-year-old: in this "L'Ufficio Delle Cose Perdute" of 1988, the album before "Matto Come Un Gatto" which in 1991 gave the author an unexpected mass success comparable to "Sapore Di Sale", "Il Cielo In Una Stanza" and "Senza Fine", there's all the enthusiasm of this "little man", this "old child" searching for his twenties but knowing that to find them he must return everything he has, who shouts against the horror of racism, who knows he couldn't survive without his woman but at the same time declares that love is utopia, a lie, and that what's important is one who stays, who mirrors in Coppi, that little man with two wheels against the whole world and would place the ass of a French whore among his trophies because it's better than the paradises of Versailles.

And then there's simply an old man, who has already seen it all, who stands by the sea with a child by the hand and with their two souls finally meeting at the end of a journey and the beginning of another, in one of his best pieces that you cannot help but carry with you forever.

To me, Paoli has always been a wise old man, one to go to when things are not going well and you don't know which direction to give your life, already knowing, deep down, what the answer he would give me would be: "the roads are right, even the wrong ones, just never be certain. I have no certainties but only doubts".

I would like to grow old like him and become that anarchic, crazy, and poetic old child that I want to continue to believe is in each of us.