GIORGIO BOCCA
The jukebox is too narrow for Mina
Il 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
La sirena dei vent’anni
L’Europeo | 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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MICK JAGGER
«People like me, Tina Turner, Paul McCartney and, in Italy, people with the voice of an angel like Mina, we have maintained our adolescent vitality because we have not succumbed to compromises of any kind…»
TONY DI CORCIA
From “Mina Viva lei”
Edizioni Clichy 2023
Tonight hell is a crowded apartment building. Whoever inhabits it longs for a love, aches for someone, waits in vain for a nod. Or, worse, he pretends to lead a normal life and in his heart harbors the ghost of a love that was never born. Identical is the refuge: the voice of Mina.
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NATALIA ASPESI
Ecco Mina più grassa più bella e più brava
La Repubblica | 04.07.1978
Mina returns to sing in public, after six years away and immediately makes two mythologies of mass summer neurosis appear petty, absurd: she is of a luminous whiteness, intact and superb, in the midst of people ashamed of their pallor, fixated on chasing wrinkled and sinister tans; it is large, opulent, richly carnal, in a crowd of desperate people who punish their dream of thinness with a guilty and tireless diet and debase their thoughts with calculation of points and calories, collection of diets, disgust of their own humanly expanded body.
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FEDERICO FELLINI
«[…] Mina has the face of the moon. The eyes are sweet and cruel. The mouth calls comets from the sky: a whistle is enough. Then it’s a lot. He’s a guy who comes into my stories. Gradisca would have done well too […] I have a lot of admiration, a lot of respect for Mina […] and I hope […] ?? difficult to meet […] I hope we can talk at least once by phone […]”
INDRO MONTANELLI
Il fragile segreto di Mina
04.02.1961
Due forze sembrano sostenerla, l’istinto e l’ignoranza. But then it is not hard to see that it is a calculated fiction so clever that it appears to be the truth. Rome, Feb. They tell me that here in Rome, the San Remo champions who came to repeat their singing feats here have had bad luck.
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MARINELLA VENEGONI
Un articolo
La Stampa | 18.04.2001
It is not a halfway meeting, this between two authentic champions of popular music, Mimmo Modugno and Mina, a meeting from which that long-heralded album emerges and which now finally arrives (it is available from tomorrow, Thursday 20th) with the title provocative of «Sconcerto». It is not halfway because Mina goes beyond the affectionate philological recovery, and instead engages in a completely original rereading of some cornerstones of the multifaceted Apulian artist.
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ANDREA CAMILLERI
«There was a time when even the most squeamish intellectuals were not ashamed of watching TV. It was the TV variety shows of Falqui and Sacerdote, comparable in elegance and professionalism to the great shows overseas. And the brightest gem of those Saturday nights was Mina’s voice. Very young; and yet, so ironic and witty. The same irony and wit that Mina would reveal many years later in her articles written with such grace and common sense for La Stampa and other newspapers…”
TONINO AMURRI
On Monday afternoon, Raiuno treacherously broadcast a whole hour of Mina
Il Giorno | 21.03.1989
“Monday afternoon, treacherously, Raiuno broadcast a full hour of Mina. Which is not nice. To those of us who watch the poor non-stop performances of the singers currently on the public square and unfortunately on video, such a musical and visual shock could provide dangerous bouts of rejection.
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GINO CASTALDO
An exceptional woman, an inaccessible life
La Repubblica | 22.10.1988
In his thirty-year career he has sung the cantabile, an enormously impressive songbook that reaches statistical 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 thirty years.
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LINA WERTMULLER
«For Mina I wrote the lyrics of “Mi sei burst inside the heart” and other songs, but as a director, obviously, I thought of her more than once, because I like her very much, above all for her particular characteristic of putting together the cold and the heat, to combine a remarkable sensitivity, a beautiful voice, a great external ability with this beautiful face of a medal, with this statuesque appearance of beautiful Italy.»
MARINELLA VENEGONI
Mina. The former tiger in love with mystery
La Stampa | 24.03.1990
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. Symbol of an Italy as good as her, glorious and optimistic, that of the boom years with which her rise coincided; but also, for most of those over thirty, a sentimental symbol in the fullest sense of the term.
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SANDRO BOLCHI
Mina, being fat is not a sin
Corriere della Sera | 23.08.1978
ROME – «I know, I’m fat, but Fitzgerald is too. Is it my fault if in this period I prefer deep-eyed broth to the French colony? I don’t want to fly, otherwise I would rent a hot air balloon that would lift me up into the sky and if a spiteful kite slapped me too hard with its wings I would slide into the sea, blowing my latest song “Lady Mazzini” for the fish, who smiles as she speaks, he enjoys hiding in certain old garb where the kilos can dance the tango without being seen or scolded, and from which emerges an increasingly solemn, generous face, dressed in white, tanned by a Sixties moon.»
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LIZA MINNELLI
«Mina is the greatest singer I have ever heard, she sings the songs just as they should be sung, as they were written, she sings with the heart, but the voice, the unmistakable timbre, the expressiveness that she knows how to give to her interpretations are sublime! It’s divine. I am one of her biggest admirers […], she gave us her heart, her voice, no one else in the world is like her… I don’t know what to say, she is for the song what De Niro is for acting: there is only her, she is unique.» (From “Porta a Porta”, Raiuno, 2008)
CARLO GIOVETTI
She can sing better than before but don’t call her a tiger
Il Giorno | 16.04.1968
Mina who sings, denies, plays cards and talks about Paciugo. Now she is relaxed and doesn’t even feel the cold wind that arrives with the dawn. “But I was scared, I was shaking all over. Once upon a time it didn’t happen to me, the older I get the more I feel frozen.” It’s right that this is the case: Mina who plays “La canzone di Marinella” is no longer the same one who shouted “The thousand blue bubbles”. Perhaps he wasn’t even afraid the first time, when he suddenly decided to go “to the other side”: right here, at Bernardini’s Bussola, in the summer of ’58.
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MARCO MANGIAROTTI
Mina, a great voice in the wind
La Nazione | 31.10.2000
MILAN – If you peel back Wind’s packaging, you find an album with four unreleased Mina covers. In half a million copies, which will be given away to new subscribers from November to Christmas (cell phone plus card plus Internet plus CD). The two-year contract between the company and the singer, which began with the voiceover in the controversial penalty spot made by Roberto Baggio, will thus give us something sonorous and palpable.
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IVANO FOSSATI
«Mina is loved by all musicians. Starting from those who earn their living playing in dance clubs up to the most refined jazz musicians and composers, in Italy and beyond. I always expected something surprising from Mina. It was she who had brought us closer to Chico Buarque, Juan Manuel Serrat, Tom Jobim, it was she who duetted with Toots Thieleman on TV at nine in the evening. He was teaching us a lot and would do even more later.
I have always listened to Mina carefully because she is also among my teachers. No one regulates and governs the sound of words like she does. No one guides and gives meaning to every single step and thought equally well, in real time. No one, or perhaps very few in the world, amplify or dampen emotions at will with their own mastery, raising or lowering the temperature of the interpretation during the same piece. Phonetics, music and thought move together and Mina knows it.»
GIANNI FERRIO
Interview by Lele Cerri
04.03.2002
Gianni Ferrio aka “the inevitability of making music.” Gianni Ferrio or “Improvvisamente,” “Ora o mai più” and many other wonderful musical games until “Non gioco più” and then again soaring with Mina’s “Dalla terra.” Gianni Ferrio companion of Mina’s long and fruitful musical journey, witnessing her entering, peeking out from behind a juke box, into the lives of Italians that, at least musically, would never be the same as before.
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ANNABELLA
What do you think of the Mina phenomenon?
29.01.1961
Mina, who achieved success through a fashionable genre, in the short span of a year and a half managed to impose her true qualities, her temperament, the timbre of her voice, her own personality. Today she is a well-rounded singer who can alternate between various ways of singing while remaining herself. Those who say that Mina is just a screamer are therefore wrong; she is also a delicate interpreter of velvety motifs and various of her recent interpretations demonstrate this.
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ELVIS COSTELLO
«Mina is the greatest Italian singer and I don’t understand how she managed to realize it so late. Reminds me of Dusty Springfield. I discovered it by chance, putting my nose – and ear – among the records of my wife, who studies your language and runs a radio show in which Italian songs often appear. I was struck by Mina and immediately went to buy all her albums. And then, I love Italy…” (2002)
MICHELE SERRA
A reckless voice
La Repubblica | 24.03.2000
The “Tiger of Cremona” turns 60 years old tomorrow. From lavish black-and-white TV show-woman to sophisticated lady of a thousand songs Mina turns sixty, and you almost can’t believe it. There are really very few of them, as many as are barely enough to make a long-distance girl. Very few to measure the long road of his steely voice, which has pierced all the ages of our age, the very many ages we have been fortunate enough to live through leaning against each other, clenched like books suffocating in a shelf that is too short.
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CÉLINE DION
«Luciano Pavarotti always spoke to me about Mina and certainly not only when we performed the English version of “Grande, grande, grande” as a duet. I was also born in March, like Mina; I too think of his voice as a great, inimitable gift of nature, the reflection of a soul” (2010)
ANTONELLO FALQUI
Interview by Lele Cerri
18.02.2002
Mr. Sense Of Space receives me in a house that confirms him as such, handsome and ready, as he is, for the wide-angle lens, for one of his shots with horizon line resets, endless farsighted central escapes, fields and counter-fields with perfect rhythms, ellipses and details, skilful and engaging, fluid tracking shots: authentic treadmills for the viewer’s curiosity, as only those precursors of the zoom that were his early Studio One tracking shots could be.
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ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA
«[…] In the covers of your records there is a great sense of play […] Beyond the singing (she) introduces the body, the image, she puts her face […] Mina ?? a performing singer who asserts her voice also through the irregularity of her features, who manages to anticipate Madonna and Lady Gaga, also exhibiting her asymmetries […]»
NATALIA ASPESI
Mina, the enchantment of the voice of a free woman
Venerdì di Repubblica | 30.10.1987
They last saw her on a stage in the summer of ’78, in Versilia. The audience was the usual vacation crowd, lots of people who felt beautiful; all tanned, all thin, even overdressed. Mina was an enchanting apparition, benevolent, maternal, ironic, even disturbing in her total disobedience to aesthetic cravings. Like a distant queen, confident of her mysterious powers, she exhibited the soft whiteness of her complexion, her fattened body, the messy black veils that covered her.
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SARAH VAUGHAN
«If I didn’t have my own voice I would like to have that of a young Italian girl named Mina» (1968)
BRUNO CANFORA
Interview by Lele Cerri
24.07.2002
And at the name of Bruno Canfora, in all of us who listened to Mina stroll fluidly over those famous “customary musical fantasies” announced by Paolo Panelli in Canzonissima 1968, a sense of gratitude cannot but awaken for his having given us the opportunity to grow as spectators of the beautiful, of that musical pleasure that we were able to enjoy live on those precious Saturday nights.
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MARINELLA VENEGONI
Mina’s 80th birthday, a book celebrates her talent
La Stampa | 24.03.2020
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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CLAUDIO ABBADO
«Mina has a great personality. Luigi Nono would have liked to compose a piece with his voice. ‘Even just one sound, just one note,’ he told me. I would have liked to direct it, I have always admired it. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time…” (2009)
SENNUCCIO BENELLI
The woman, and other things
Successo | 03.01.1962
The “tiger of Cremona” and the least conformist of Italian filmmakers discuss here the place of women in society: mother and wife in the home, or “almost man,” and perhaps diva, outside it?
Before this meeting Visconti and Mina knew each other only by reputation. They admired each other, but had never shaken hands.
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LELE CERRI
Mina and the Orchestra exclusively at Bussola 1972
1972
Mina, in the spring and summer of 1972, gives us an extraordinary repetition of an exceptional daily routine of TV and live appearances. She almost seems to want to recast us in advance of her future absence from the scene, still unknown to her as much as to us.
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FABRIZIO DE ANDRÉ
«His voice is a miracle. I believe she was born with music in her DNA, it’s as if she had a prenatal memory of music. This is a typical phenomenon of genius: that of knowing before knowing. You realize it when you hear her sing because the vocal evolutions, the dips, the glissades, the clusters of notes in very short intervals of time, the distortions of the melody are absolutely spontaneous…” (1997)
GIANNI CLERICI
Success paid dearly
Il Giorno | 03.09.1966
There are more tar marks than words in the notebook from the meeting with Mina. Together we spent six hours on the roof of the huge hangar-workshop in Fiumicino, a construction by architect Morandi all hanging from huge concrete ropes: Mina was to shoot carousels, and Piero Gherardi, the scriptwriter of Fellini’s last films, had chosen that astral location and more suitable for an Antonioni film…
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NATALIA ASPESI
For the only Mina of the 2000 season, there were spectators
Il Giorno | 25.07.1962
It looks like one of those photographs that the great American magazines dedicate to the monuments of pop music and jazz: the background is completely dark, a line of light outlines the outline of a couple of serious, busy musicians, and makes her profile shine , of the diva. The arm that holds the microphone, the one that sways tiredly towards the audience, the curves of the deep neckline of the black dress, the dramatic face that Gershwin is suffering.
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PINO DANIELE
«When the era of appearances began, she decided to be the Lady who disappeared, all voice and no image, fueling the myth, of course, but art feeds on myth. Seventy years old on March 25, but the myths are celebrated every day and the voices sing every day. They don’t need cakes with candles if, like Mina’s and a few others, they transcend nationalities, cultures, languages. Like Lucio Battisti, like Salinger, she remained at the center of the collective imagination, evaporating, while many tried to underline her own obstinate, invisible presence. The voice, amazing, agile, like a musician-singer, capable of making the words sound, of making the notes speak. Intuition in the choice of repertoires, without problems as to whether they were “high” or “low”, increasingly meaningless terms. The stage presence: we won’t remember Lucio Battisti’s extraordinary live performances, but we will remember her, master of black and white TV, alongside Totò, Sordi, Gaber, Mastroianni, Kessler, Carrà. Music beyond appearance, extraordinary talent in search of a normal, indeed very normal, life, which allowed her to choose the songs she really wanted to sing: I had the privilege of seeing my «Napule è» and «Je sto neighbor» also selected to you”, moreover in magnificent company, of Neapolitan classics and pearls of what we once dreamed of being the new Naples. Even today, in the midst of the age of talent shows and televoting that promotes kids to stars and rejects singers with decades of career behind them, she is the symbol of a country that perhaps doesn’t deserve her. His irony, his dignity, his indolent freedom, his silence speak more than a thousand shouted opinions from talk shows that say nothing. Best wishes, Our Lady of Song. If you hadn’t existed we wouldn’t have been able to invent you.” (2010, for Mina’s 70th birthday)
LELIO LUTTAZZI
Interview by Lele Cerri
03.04.2002
Here, I am in the square, overlooking the valley and towards the sea; the one behind the roofs is the chimney of his house, white clouds of smoke that promise an exquisite roast.
His wife Rossana opens the door for me, kisses and hugs that celebrate a beautiful slice of life spent together, and there, behind, in the corridor with walls and a background of books, with the look I expected, Lelio Luttazzi…
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GUIDO GEROSA
Stars are born at Porta Garibaldi
La Notte | 02.12.1958
The tall girl with the skinny shoulder blades did not want to come out of the wings to sing her song: she swayed restlessly, smoothed her short hair nervously, and smiled as she fixed her gaze in a vague, distant spot suspended in the void. Seventeen years old, 5’7″ in stature, a dress that wobbled on her, Mina took refuge behind her shyness; host Corrado had to make her brave.
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KENNY BARRON
«You ask me who is the best Standard Jazz singer today? The greatest of all is an Italian singer named Mina.»