Alessandro Sebastiani

I still remember that class in middle school when, for the first time, they played “La Gatta” by Gino Paoli for us. Our teacher made us listen to it several times and then asked what we thought the lyrics meant. In it, I saw the sadness of growing older, of becoming an adult, and of losing the innocence of childhood. The child in the song had nothing, and yet he had his cat. The little house had given way to a larger one, to a kind of maturity attained at the cost of a child’s lightheartedness. The teacher, and I will never forget it, told me I had understood nothing at all, that it was simply a song about a boy’s cat and the way his thoughts returned to that little animal. Who knows who was right? Maybe she was, maybe I was, or maybe someone else might find yet another meaning in it.

What I do know is that every time I hear that song, that scene comes back to me, in those old middle school classrooms in Grosseto. And from today on, I will also remember that Gino Paoli is no longer with us, though his songs remain part of my cultural memory, whether or not that matters in a world that could use a little more of the innocence of children, and perhaps a cat with a black mark on its face.