The Last Poet of the Genoese School Is Gone
The voice behind Il cielo in una stanza and Sapore di sale has died in Genoa, leaving behind a catalogue that shaped Italian popular music for six decades.
Gino Paoli died today in Genoa. He was 91 years old, born in Monfalcone on September 23, 1934. He is survived by his wife Paola Penzo and his children Amanda, Nicolò and Tommaso. His eldest son Giovanni had predeceased him, dying of a heart attack in Milan in March 2025.
The news arrived quietly, as deaths of this kind often do. But the silence will not last long. Paoli was not simply a singer. He was one of the architects of what Italian music became.
The Room, the Sky, the Sea
Paoli is widely considered one of the greatest figures in Italian popular music of the 1960s and 70s. He wrote and performed songs that became part of the national memory: Il cielo in una stanza, La gatta, Senza fine, Sapore di sale, and Quattro amici, among many others.
He came of age musically in Genoa, part of a circle of friends who would go on to define an era: Luigi Tenco, Bruno Lauzi, Fabrizio De André, Umberto Bindi. They called it the Scuola Genovese, the Genoese School, and it produced some of the most enduring songs in the Italian language.
His first records, released in 1959, sold almost nothing. La gatta, an autobiographical song published in 1960, sold barely a hundred copies in its first three months. Word of mouth eventually pushed it into the charts, and the music industry took notice. Three years later, Sapore di sale made him a star of a different order entirely. He later described the experience of sudden fame with characteristic candor: it changed him, and not always for the better.
A Life of Extremes
Paoli’s biography reads like a novel that nobody would have dared to publish. He spent his early childhood in Giulian-Dalmatian territory before his family moved to Genoa to escape the ethnic violence of the post-war years. Several of his mother’s relatives died in the foibe massacres carried out by Tito’s forces.
In July 1963, at the height of his fame and in the grip of a deep personal crisis, he shot himself in the chest. The bullet lodged near his heart and was never removed, the surgery deemed too dangerous. He survived, returned to music, and lived for another 62 years with the bullet still inside him. He spoke about it often, and without self-pity.
He battled alcoholism for fifteen years, quitting only after his brother died from the same condition. He had four children by three different women, including Amanda Sandrelli, born of his relationship with actress Stefania Sandrelli when she was still a teenager. He served as a member of parliament for the Italian Communist Party. He won the Festivalbar. He made a career-defining comeback at 50 with Una lunga storia d’amore. He kept recording, kept touring, kept talking.
What He Leaves Behind
Paoli participated in five editions of the Sanremo Festival and collaborated with countless colleagues over a career spanning more than six decades. He also composed music for film soundtracks. His songs have been covered by virtually every significant Italian artist of the past half century, and by many beyond Italy.
Senza fine, written in 1961, may be his most perfect creation: a love song with no beginning and no end, structured like an emotion rather than a narrative. It has never stopped being played.
He was 91. He had lived, by any measure, an extraordinary life. He leaves behind the songs, and in Italy, that is enough to last forever.
Gino Paoli, born Monfalcone, September 23, 1934. Died Genoa, March 24, 2026.
