We've listened to a lot of songs, but some travel with us our whole lives, stuck in our memory for almost unconscious reasons, more related to the accidents of our lives than to past or present musical tastes.

Italian music has just lost one of its most outstanding, prolific, and veteran voices, that of Gino Paoli, who died at the age of 91 in Genoa, the city where he had lived for decades. The long career of the musician and singer-songwriter, born on September 23, 1934, in Monfalcone—in the Friuli region—began in the late 1950s with a simple, elegant, and autobiographical song. The cat

August ends, and mentally, summer ends. And these articles end, thanks to everyone who has kept the author company. Finally, a personal obsession. I'm ready to engage in a dramatic duel to defend this theory: no one knows how to enjoy summer like Italians do. Nowhere will you find as many cultural references to summer as in Italy. All the great singers and artists have devoted their attention to it, making summer the protagonist of songs or films. Although in reality, Italians also have a tourism sector in something of a crisis, with a heated debate about the mania for privatizing beaches and rising prices, summer occupies a central place in the collective imagination across the country. That's why I still hear the song that used to play around the house because my grandmother liked it: Sapore di sale, by Gino Paoli.