The woman who would later be affectionately called La Tigre di Cremona (The Tiger from Cremona), Mina, one of the most popular and influential postwar Italian artists, was born in the province of Lombardy in 1940. Her first performance came in 1958 at a club called La Bussola, near Lucca, where Italdisc-Broadway producer David Matalon was impressed with the young singer and soon recorded four songs with her, two in English, Be Bop a Lula and When, under the name Baby Gate, and two in Italian, Non Partir and Malatia, as Mina. It was the latter name that she chose, and stuck with, for her debut album, Tintarella di Luna, which was released in 1960.\r \r In 1963, when an affair with married actor Corrado Pani produced a child, Mina was banned from Italian state TV, though she was allowed to perform a year later, and from that point on her career only blossomed. She continued to record dozens of albums, and thanks to her high visibility in the tel...