Posted by Ripley, the TV series on Netflix, is immersed in Italian art and music: Il Cielo in una Stanza is the recurrent song you need to discover.
Movies and series are always fantastic for discovering new music and art pieces. Especially if set in a far place we don’t fully know: Ripley, the new TV series that landed on Netflix in April 2024, develops its plot in Italy in the 1960s and does a great job showing us the cultural environment of those years.
The TV show is based on the famous book written by Patricia Highsmith in the 1950s. Netflix’s transposition is a beautiful black-and-white photograph, portraying a controversial protagonist, how he jumped into others’ lives, and how his actions parallel Caravaggio’s story. While we watch Tom Ripley’s story, we get caught in Caravaggio’s famous paintings, and we keep hearing the music that was popular in Italy in those years.
One song in particular keeps coming back in the key scenes of the plot. We even hear it from the female singer Tom and Dickie watch in one of the first episodes: it’s Il Cielo in una Stanza, a classic of Italian music history, brought to success by Mina in 1960. You can listen to the original version below.
Il Cielo in una Stanza was originally written by Gino Paoli, a songwriter who will also become famous in Italy in those years. Mina was already a rising artist who had scored a number 1 song the year before. Released in 1960, Il Cielo in una Stanza was the lead single of her second album and became the song that transformed Mina’s musical career. Gino Paoli released his own version of the song also in 1960, you can listen to it here.
You can hear the song Il Cielo in una Stanza in many significant moments of the Ripley plot. It becomes one of the protagonist’s favorite songs during his new life in Italy, and we even hear a live version of it from a local singer, in the first half of the TV show. Its lyrics come up recurrently in the show:
Quando sei qui con me
Questa stanza non ha più pareti
When you are here with me
This room has no longer walls
Gino Paoli explained the meaning of the lyrics: Il Cielo in una Stanza is about the feeling a man has when he’s in bed with the woman he loves, in their intimate moments. A room is no longer a room, there are no longer boundaries, and you have all the happiness you can wish for.
In our Italian pages, Selene Barbone even disclosed a secret story behind the song: some years after the song was released, Gino Paoli explained that the original inspiration came from the room where a prostitute in Genoa worked, a room the singer often visited. That room had a violet ceiling, and Gino Paoli thought about it when he wrote “The Sky in a Room” (that’s how “Il Cielo in una Stanza” is translated into English). It came as a shock because everybody thought it was a pure, romantic love song. Gino Paoli answered with those words:
“What’s so strange? Who said you can’t love a prostitute? For me, sex is like a human sacrifice, something that throws you into a mystical dimension. If there is no love, sex calls it out anyway, gives birth to it, maybe even just for that moment.
I wanted to describe the or**sm: […] that moment after you are projected into infinity, you are everything and you are nothing. That moment you can try a hundred times, but you will never be able to describe. But if you describe everything around as a spiral, it is as if you were reconstructing the center […]. So I wrote The Sky in a Room, Il Cielo in una Stanza: the walls, the window, the music from outside, and I tried to reconstruct that moment.”
Those who watch Ripley and hear the beauty of that song would never think Il Cielo in una Stanza hid such a mystery. As always, art is able to conceal the meaning behind its form. Nevertheless, you can’t deny it: it’s a beautiful love song, describing one of the most intense moments we can experience in life. Independently from its real inspiration.
