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It's not a lullaby, as you might think from the title. On the contrary, the song that Ermal Meta brings to the Sanremo stage is a song with a brisk tempo, somewhere between Latin and Balkan sounds. And yet, his Stella stellina is born from a silent encounter, from a look that stays with you and won't let you go....
It's the gaze of a girl from Gaza, nameless and yet able to tell the story of an entire people: present in everyone's words, but far too often forgotten in practice.
As the singer recounts, the song came out all at once, in just a few hours, as happens when an emotion claims space and cannot wait any longer. Then there was a meeting with Dardust, to give it a broader, more powerful sound, almost as if it should be able to carry the weight of everything contained in its lyrics.
Difficult images linger in Ermal Meta's memory, the ones on social media that you consciously open because they're tagged as 'sensitive content'. Out of all those images, the very face of this girl touched him the most.
By now it's night, he says. At home, Fortuna, his little girl of only one and a half, is sleeping. After rocking her to sleep, he goes to the studio and the melody that had been created for her makes itself heard again, but takes a different direction and fills with a different urgency. "Stellina" is no longer just a whispered caress at bedtime: it becomes a question that stings, that demands to be looked at without averting one's gaze.
How do you explain to a child what will happen next? How do you find words for them to understand, when we adults ourselves are already struggling to truly grasp it? In that vulnerable space, between innocence and pain, the song takes shape: a careful attempt to remain human, to keep looking for light even where it seems to have disappeared.
(©GreenMe.it 2026/Managing Editor: Selma Keshkire - The Press Junction/Picture: ©picture alliance/dpa/dpa-POOL | Peter Kneffel)