Marisa Sannia
La Pasta Scotta

I do not own this album, dated 1976. I assume it has never been reissued on CD or other platforms. It can be considered as Marisa Sannia's first singer-songwriter album and, given the era of its release, one of the earliest examples of female singer-songwriting in Italy.

Having downloaded the album, I do not know the names of the musicians or authors who participated in the project, and yet they gave prestige to the songs with arrangements bordering on prog (the long tail of "Anche se non so nuotare"), and guitar parts in a plucked and soft style.

The lyrics are quite simple, clear, and limpid but reveal a deep poetic sense (my personal opinion).

There is the contrast between ownership and freedom in "Il guardiano" where one hears the dialogue between a bird and a garden guardian who also wants to know how to fly, like the bird he tries to chase away, but realizes that freedom is a prerogative that does not belong to him (does it not belong to "man"?).

There is the desire for autonomy and emancipation (after all, these are the years of feminism) in "Chi sei?".

The rejection of pompousness and the search for simplicity in "Ma quale regina", the realization of a difficult fidelity, the cooling of a relationship in the metaphor of "È freddo il tuo caffè" which in the title track unites with the search for something else. If "Masticavo chewing-gum", dealing with the regret of a lost youth and freshness, makes one smile a bit for the literal pronunciation of the word in the title, the album's pinnacle is the aforementioned "Anche se non so nuotare": it is a metaphor for coming into the world (the album was composed during the artist's pregnancy), the mystery of waiting imagined as a long struggle in the sea that ends with landing on the earth but it can also be interpreted as inadequacy in the face of reality, which does not end with childhood and extends throughout life.

The songs are catchy, have country and folk-rock echoes and gracefully carry unpretentious, simple but not trivial melodies. The lyrics, I repeat, do not pretend to be philosophical but are of great immediacy without losing in reflectiveness.

Marisa Sannia's musical career would continue with a forgettable appearance at the Sanremo Festival in 1984, especially for the highly saccharine chorus repeated endlessly, and with truly memorable albums of Sardinian folk on poems by authors in dialect published in the '90s, like the beautiful "Sa oghe de sa entu e de su mare" and "Melagranada". Unfortunately, her passing last year left a great void and will not be easily filled: let us at least try not to forget her.