Music & Cities: Laura Pausini’s ‘Anime Parallele’ in Pàdova

In this new column for Atwood Magazine, I explore the impact of one artist and album across the range of my experience in one city or across several cities. The aspiration is that you will resonate with my experiences and how they might intersect with your own life in deepening our understanding and reflection on a particular artist and album in our contemporary world.

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Experiencing Laura Pausini’s ‘Anime Parallele’ live in Pàdova, on a night that was a tribute to her own career and timeless songs across the ages, was an experience of a lifetime which was so uniquely felt in the fabric of Italian nightlife in the patina of her own steps.

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Stream: ‘Anime parallele’ – Laura Pausini

I recall the day when I first heard Laura Pausini which was her song “Tra te e il mare” on her 2000 album of the same title, a song that held the promise of a more expansive manner of finding one’s way in the world amidst the trauma of long lost love. From that moment, I knew that her breath and capacity of song held something so very special in my life.

Tra te e il mare - Laura Pausini — Tra te e il mare – Laura Pausini

In that time, I was sitting in a cafe in a Mexican coastal town as Pausini was gripping the world with her beguiling voice, as I was recuperating from the loss of my own engagement with Isabella — the scintillating star of my eye. We had fallen in love so quickly in a short summer, yet our entanglement with each other was so immense and all encompassing as we seemed to be promised to each other forever. The unfortunate reality is that we became lost souls and remain always imprinted in each other’s absence.

It’s uncanny to think that over twenty years have passed, and living with Pausini’s music has inspired a more beautiful way of seeing the world and experiencing this life within its fragility, wonder, preciousness, and with a sense of the joyful melancholy of longing.

A couple months ago, I embarked on a long stay in Italy, and spotlighted to see Laura Pausini play the Arena Spettacoli Fiera Di Pàdova on the 6th of January in 2024. Earlier that day we departed from the Santa Lucia train station on a sun-drenched glamorous winter day in Venezia to take the brief train trip to Pàdova for an early afternoon arrival to bask in the ambience of this marvelous small city. As the day became overcast we sauntered through the outdoor market and onto the main piazza which was abuzz with side street shopping and brimming with outdoor bars as people enjoyed their spritz and Prosecco. It was an entrancing late afternoon as we had a couple drinks and then ambled our way back to the hotel to get ready for the concert while enjoying a bottle of red wine.

Anime Parallele - Laura Pausini — Anime Parallele – Laura Pausini

Anime Parallele, released on 27 October 2023, is Pausini’s fifteenth studio album, and the mood of this LP captures that very unique ambience of warmth and familiarity that Pausini creates so poignantly in making the human experience feel so interior and intimate. The freshness and contemplative urgency on this album evoke new figurings on the beguiling beauty of life.

Months earlier, the only song I could ever hear was Pausini’s “Scatola” which seemed to be on eternal repeat in reality and in my mind — a liberating song of time, memory, and the remaining imprints of lost love.

We walked into the Arena Spettacoli Fiera Di Pàdova that night, and totally unlike any other American venue the cost of drinks was so totally egalitarian, at €5 for spritz, Peroni, and Prosecco amidst freshly made pizza. As we waited in line for drinks we so easily and amicably drifted into conversation and we felt like we were in unison with everyone as we awaited for Pausini to take the stage.

The wonders of long periods of travel in Europe can be so very palpably felt if one stays in a city for weeks on end and becomes immersed in local life where community and social life naturally thrives, and feels so very different, egalitarian, and more intimate than social life in the U.S. or Canada. In our weeks in Venezia one of our regular local haunts was the Enoteca al Volto in the hidden depths of Calle Cavalli near Rialto and we relished languishing with the small groups of locals that would frequently buzz with a vibrancy that was aided by spritz, ombre, Prosecco, and the freedom of smoke. As the days and weeks passed by we began to inhabit that enoteca as our own local community as we all gathered in the liquid darkness of the night at the outdoor wooden tables in the narrow calle and celebrated life in the lagoon shrouded in abundant scarves, woolen hats, and fingerless gloves.

The local concert hall in Pàdova that night was teeming with energy and anticipation as Pausini was kicking off her 2024 world tour, and one could sense that for Pausini this was a home concert for her, and for the audience she was their heroine. The evening was a marvelous descent into some of the hits from Anime Parallele along with most of her memorable songs across the decades in a concert that spanned three hours of integral wonder in song and performance, and that was also posed as a contemplative reflection on how she became to be as an artist and what this has meant to her over time.

That concert was one of the memorable highlights of the weeks in Italy, and after being saturated within her marvelous world of musical vision for a delightful three hours, we returned to the main piazza of Pàdova around midnight to enjoy a drink on an outside terrace on that crisp late winter night before a cocktail at a cozy lounge with up and down seating. We closed out that night luxuriating in the fresh solitude of our hotel’s open lobby-bar while enjoying a few Italian reds, late night cicchetti, and of course listening to Pausini’s Anime Parallele, before we hit the threads of the crisp sheets.

Experiencing Laura Pausini’s Anime Parallele live in Pàdova on a night that was a tribute to her own career and timeless songs across the ages was an experience of a lifetime which was so uniquely felt in the fabric of Italian nightlife in the patina of her own steps.

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