Gino Castaldo – An exceptional woman, an inaccessible life – La Repubblica 22.10.1988

By Gino Castaldo – La Repubblica
22.10.1988

In his 30-year career, he has sung the cantabile, a huge imposing songbook that reaches statistical tally proportions.

What did this voice mean to us? This voice so ductile that it can be sometimes so hyperuranic and crystalline, sometimes warm and sly, sometimes virtuosic, sometimes softly interpretive. It is “the” Italian voice of these 30 years.

She is the great mother, but also a passionate woman, yet her voice always has something that makes her unattainable, as if she could exist even beyond the character to which she belongs. And this feeling of partial unreality is not only due to the recent disappearance. He was there even when his face was familiar to the entire television audience.

Mina was nice, friendly, human when she talked and joked with guests, but when she began to sing something special always happened; her golden uvula seemed to access some strange and angelic region not quite accessible to ordinary mortals. All this began at a precise, perfectly recognizable moment, namely when Mina sang and brought the song “Il cielo in una stanza” to success, thanks to the decisive meeting with Gino Paoli. Mina in that piece discovered the possibility of giving voice to an important song, of making it so high, so distant, so inaccessible. There she became a true performer, one of those voices that are born so rarely that they are considered unique and unrepeatable phenomena.

Legend has it that at the height of her career Mina was courted heavily by Americans. and we have no doubt about the outcome that a Mina launched by the American star system would have had in the world. But Mina said no, who knows whether out of snobbery or fear, or perhaps to remain to the end an Italian product, one of the few, musically, of which we can be proud.

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They say about her

11 November 2023

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Giorgio Bocca – The jukebox is too tight for Mina – ll Giorno 11.12.1960

Tonight Mina has crazy hair and a dress on which sequins shine. Pale. Slender, her eyes dilated with neurotic rage, the girl wrings her hands to overcome the disgust of strangers breathing down on her.
We are in a dance hall on the outskirts of Turin. With two thousand five hundred liras each (almost two days’ work) the young men of the neighborhood paid themselves, for one hour, for the physical presence of Italy’s most famous “screamer”; the lucky ones, now, surround her little table, under the orchestra.

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Oriana Fallaci – The siren of twenty years – The European 05.02.1961

But who, then, is this girl who in not even two years has become a kind of myth of Italians young and old, poor and rich, suckers and smart, communists and Catholics, and in one minute earns as much as a magistrate earns in a month (one hundred and fifty thousand traffic circles), in one week collects six covers of authoritative weeklies, and if you say you have never seen her sing they treat you as an ignoramus, a traitor to the fatherland, or a cretin?

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Tony di Corcia from “Mina Viva lei” – Clichy Editions 2023

It has become very difficult to write about Mina.
This oh-so-round and fateful birthday of 80, which falls today, has already been consumed by streams of words, hordes of footage, odd images.
Everything seems already said. Premature retirement in 1978-an anti-media seclusion-made her forever young.

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Natalia Aspesi – Here is Mina fatter more beautiful and better – La Repubblica 04.07.1978

Fifty years? It could be 30 or 90, it would be the same. Tomorrow Mina turns half a century old, and the occasion only serves to make it clear how the singer has become, in Italian custom, a symbol rather than a living person. A symbol of an Italy as good as she was, glorious and optimistic, that of the boom years with which her rise coincided; but also, for most of those over 30, a sentimental symbol in the fullest sense of the word.

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