There is something Gino Paoli had confessed with that amused irony that was his most authentic form of reticence: all his life he had sung with a single vocal cord. The other had been paralysed from birth, in all likelihood. He discovered this by chance in the Nineties, when he lost his voice entirely and an ear, nose and throat specialist looked down his throat. The result of that examination should have been devastating news for a singer. Paoli, however, spoke of it as a belated confirmation of something he had always known without knowing it: that his was not a singer’s voice, and that this had been precisely the reason he had been able to do what he did.

One must start here to understand Gino Paoli, who died on 24 March 2026 in Genoa, at the age of ninety-one. Not from the discography, not from the Genoese school, not from the accolades. One must start from that motionless vocal cord, from that original flaw that became style, from that physiological limitation that was transformed into a poetics. In a country that had built its musical identity on bel canto, on full projection, on round and polished sound, Paoli brought a rough, rasping, almost spoken voice. A voice that scratched rather than flowed. A voice that, in the Italian tradition, had no business being on a stage.

And yet that voice moved through sixty years of Italian music like an underground current that never stops carving.

The Italy of the economic boom loved clear voices, beautiful and refined sound as a promise of social ascent. A song had to be reassuring in timbre before it was reassuring in content. When Ricordi decided to launch this penniless painter from Genoa who had worked as a porter and a commercial graphic artist before picking up a guitar, they found themselves facing something for which they had no category. Paoli himself was aware of the anomaly. He was not presenting himself as a performer in the conventional sense. He was presenting himself as someone who has something to say and finds the least costly way to say it.

The paralysed vocal cord, in this sense, was not merely an anatomical fact. It was the symbol of an aesthetic. Paoli had understood — or perhaps felt, which is not the same thing but sometimes counts for more — that technical perfection would have betrayed his lyrics. That a voice too beautiful would have drawn attention away from the word. That polished sound creates distance, while rough sound creates proximity. His lyrics were built on concrete, physical images, often scandalous in their simplicity — a purple ceiling in a house of ill repute, the taste of salt on skin, a cat on an attic by the sea. Those images needed a voice that would not embellish them, that would carry them without adorning them.

Ornella Vanoni, who was Paoli’s muse and accomplice for a lifetime, recalled their first encounter in the corridors of Ricordi like this: she had heard him play wonderful songs terribly. In that phrase lies all the interpretive key one needs. The disproportion between the means and the content was the secret. Paoli was not a performer who performed songs. He was a poet who used the song as the only possible vehicle for a certain quality of emotion, and his imperfect voice was an integral part of that project, even when the project was unconscious.

But the most revealing story of all is that of Il cielo in una stanza, and it must be told precisely, because it is there that the entire question reveals itself in its full complexity.

Paoli wrote the song in 1959 or 1960 — sources differ by a few months — lying on the bed of a Genoese brothel, staring at a purple ceiling. He had fallen in love with that girl. He had stolen an encyclopaedia from his father to sell it and keep paying for those visits. When she left the city, he thought of following her. He decided against it. He never saw her again. That girl never knew the song was for her. This is the territory from which Il cielo in una stanza comes: not the love lyric in any traditional sense, but something riskier and truer, love born where it should not be.

The song had no chorus. It had no rhymes. It followed none of the conventions that popular music of the era considered necessary. It was structured like a modernist poem, a lyrical flow without formal scaffolding, built on anadiplosis and anaphora rather than verse and refrain. Ariston turned it down. Jula De Palma refused to sing it. Miranda Martino likewise. Ricordi finally said yes and offered the song to Mina — twenty years old, already famous for Tintarella di luna, still at the beginning of her extraordinary arc. She was sceptical at first. Then she was persuaded, and during the recording session, at the final bars, she burst into tears while the orchestra rose to its feet and applauded. It was the arranger Tony De Vita who told Paoli: you don’t know what happened, this will be a great success. He was right. Mina’s version was released in June 1960 and remained at the top of the charts for eleven consecutive weeks.

Paoli did not appear in the credits because he was not yet registered with the SIAE, the Italian authors’ society. The signatures on the single were Mogol’s for the lyrics and Toang’s for the music, names of convenience for a bureaucracy that did not yet know what to do with an author who had materialised from nowhere. The song was only later registered under his own name.

So far the story is well known, or should be. What matters most, from a critical standpoint, is what happened next. Paoli recorded his own version in the same year, and then in 1962 he cut a further one, with an arrangement by Ennio Morricone and the orchestra of Gian Piero Reverberi, which was never released as a single but which over time became the most celebrated of all. Two versions of the same song, two voices opposite in technique and timbre, both necessary, both true.

Mina’s voice on Il cielo in una stanza is an act of liberation. It is a voice that takes the text and carries it where the text asks to go — upward, toward openness, toward that dilation of physical space which is the song’s central theme. Mina has the technical resources to do what Paoli cannot: swell the sound, expand it, transform a room into a cosmos. There is something more open, less possessive, in the female version — free too from that residue of machismo which in Paoli’s interpretation faithfully reflected the cultural climate of the early Sixties.

But Paoli’s version has another quality that no beautiful voice could possess: the absolute credibility of origin. That scratching voice tells a true story because it sounds like someone who has lived it. It does not interpret: it testifies. The difference is not technical, it is moral. And that is the thing that cannot be imitated and cannot be taught.

The paradox of Il cielo in una stanza is that Paoli’s most famous song became famous through a voice that was not his. And yet the song could not have existed without him, without that voice that Mina then made immortal. There is here a subtle dialectic between composer and performer that says something important about the Italian canzone d’autore: the singer-songwriter is not necessarily the best interpreter of his own work. Indeed, sometimes the opposite is true — a song reaches its completed form only when someone else takes it and carries it beyond the limits of its creator.

Paoli knew this, or understood it early. And his response was not that of a man wounded in his pride, but that of an author who had grasped something fundamental about his own nature. He continued to write for others. Senza fine for Ornella Vanoni, who at the time was still the singer of the criminal underworld discovered by Giorgio Strehler, and who with that song — an almost jazzy three-four time, something that resembled nothing else circulating in Italy in 1961 — found her first true artistic voice. Senza fine would travel the world, eventually counting around three hundred versions: Herbert von Karajan, not a man given to easy praise, sent Paoli his personal congratulations. Vanoni had died on 22 November 2025, four months before him: they had left almost together, the two who had shared music, love and a complicity of sixty years without ever ceasing to see each other. He wrote for Mina, for Patty Pravo, for Franco Battiato, for Zucchero. And he did so knowing that those voices would carry his songs where his own voice could not reach.

But he never stopped singing. And here lies the most interesting thing about the whole affair.

Because Paoli did not sing to demonstrate that he could sing. He sang because his voice — that defective voice, that single vocal cord working while the other remained still — possessed a quality that no technically perfect voice could replicate: the quality of lived experience. Every imperfection of that timbre was a sonic scar. The rough grain of the sound was the trace of a life that had paid no heed to its own safety: the calibre-5 bullet lodged in the pericardium since July 1963 and never removed, the years of excess and crisis that followed success, the women loved with that total lack of measure which is the other name for talent when it spills over into life, the son Giovanni lost in 2025 at sixty, a grief that marked him irreparably.

He had shot himself in the summer of 1963, one afternoon, with a Derringer aimed at his heart. He was rich and famous. Sapore di sale had already come out with Ennio Morricone’s arrangement and Gato Barbieri’s saxophone solo, and had become the soundtrack of an Italian summer — that luminous surface, that sea, that tanned skin, and beneath it, as always with Paoli, the subtle melancholy of one who already knows that happiness is provisional. He said afterwards, explaining the act with his habitual anti-sentimentality: I wanted to see what would happen. The bullet missed the vital organs. It remained in the pericardium, where it slowly calcified, and from which it would never be removed. In his last interview, with the Quotidiano Nazionale in September 2024, Paoli laughed at the idea that in a hundred years all that would remain of him was a bullet.

That bullet is the precise opposite of vocal perfection. It is the material proof of a life that never sought to be beautiful, only true. And the voice that came out of it — that voice with a single cord, that voice that scratches rather than flows — was the right voice for the lyrics it carried. Not despite its flaws. Because of them.

Something must also be said about jazz, because jazz is the context without which the question of Paoli’s voice remains incomprehensible. He had met Lester Young at sixteen, in the lobby of a Genoese hotel after a concert. Young, who revealed to him the secret of that music. The essence of jazz lies in bodily naturalness, in improvisation that arises from the body before the mind, in the renunciation of beautiful form in favour of true expression. In that moment, for that Genoese boy who had already worked as a porter and a painter and a graphic artist and had understood that music was the only thing that mattered, something fell into place. The imperfect voice had found its genealogy. Not in Italian bel canto but in the American jazz ballad, in Billie Holiday — whom Paoli called his true teacher and to whom in 1977 he dedicated Signora giorno — in the tension between sound and silence, between the held note and the note released.

That lesson was not elaborated immediately. Paoli’s early Sixties are years of singer-songwriter music derived from French sources — Brel, Brassens, Ferré, Aznavour — rather than explicit jazz. Existentialist France had furnished the post-war generation with a model of emotional intelligence expressed through song: not entertainment, not virtuosity, but the precise word that names the emotion and renders it universal. The so-called Genoese school — a geographical label more than an aesthetic one, as someone has rightly observed — was not a school in any academic sense. It was a group of friends who had discovered this music coming from outside and had understood that it could be made in Italian.

Within that group — Tenco, De André, Bindi, Lauzi — Paoli was perhaps the least mythologised, the most contradictory, the hardest to contain within a coherent image. De André became the poet of the marginalised with a poetic consistency that was almost ascetic. Tenco burned fast and left an absence more eloquent than his presence. Paoli survived everything, including himself, and this made him harder to read. He survived the bullet, the crisis of the Sixties, politics — he served as a Communist Party MP between 1987 and 1992, an experience he judged disappointing — the loss of his closest friends. He was, by his own definition, a collector of mistakes. But mistakes, in art, are often the most direct road to truth.

Jazz returned explicitly in the final phase of his career, through the collaboration with Danilo Rea, a world-class pianist who accompanied him on his most recent tours. These were concerts in which the songs of a lifetime were dismantled and reassembled around improvisation, in which the voice no longer needed to pretend to be beautiful because the context — the jazz piano, the open spaces of the harmony — made explicit what had always been implicit: that voice was not Paoli’s limitation, it was his style.

There is a 2012 album, Due come noi che…, recorded with Danilo Rea, which is perhaps the most honest document of the entire career. Paoli is seventy-eight, the voice is what it is, Rea’s piano supports and questions it simultaneously. Il cielo in una stanza in that version is something completely different from all previous versions: it is not the song of 1960, it is not nostalgia, it is not the classic being performed. It is a piece of living memory that goes on transforming itself. The voice with a single active vocal cord does everything it can do, and what it can do is a great deal — not because it has grown more beautiful, but because it has grown more itself.

This is the point that the obituaries of these hours tend to miss, caught up as they are in cataloguing successes, in the turbulent biography, in the need to construct a legible profile for those who did not know him. Paoli’s greatness does not lie in the quantity of his songs or the length of his career. It lies in the fact that he built a coherent aesthetic out of a flaw. He understood — or felt, which is not the same thing — that his imperfect voice was the right instrument for a body of work that refused perfection as a category. He wrote lyrics without a chorus when everyone wanted a chorus, he sang with a scratching voice when everyone wanted a polished voice, he staged a love story set in a brothel when everyone wanted the stock Italian romantic.

And then he had the lucidity, or the generosity, to let others sing his songs. To acknowledge that Mina could carry Il cielo in una stanza where he could not reach. To know that Ornella Vanoni could make of Senza fine something different and equally true. This is not a renunciation. It is the signature of an author who had understood the distinction between the song and the performance, between the work and the rendering, and chose to stand on the side of the work knowing that the choice would cost him visibility and perhaps comprehension.

What remains, in the end, is that calibre-5 bullet in the pericardium. And that voice with a single active vocal cord, which for sixty years sang wonderful songs played badly. They were the same thing: two foreign objects lodged in the body, two anomalies become identity, two flaws become style.