Raggela comes from the verb "raggelare," meaning to freeze or to chill suddenly and intensely, often used to describe a shock so strong it feels physically cold. It paints emotion as something that can literally stop the blood.
The lyric "Il sangue si raggela nelle vene" ("the blood freezes in the veins") uses the verb to describe an overwhelming fear or shock, as if the body itself reacts to news too terrible to process.
Mina turns a possible breakup into an apocalypse. She opens with two commands rather than an argument: "Amore" ("Love") and "Abbracciamoci" ("Let's hug each other"), then "Perdoniamoci" ("Let's forgive ourselves"), before she explains why. "Perché sento un tuono profondo" ("Because I hear a deep thunder"). The refrain names the stakes directly: "È la fine del mondo" ("It's the end of the world"), "Se finisce l'amor" ("If love ends").
What follows isn't a metaphor so much as a body keeping score. The sun is still out, "Per me risplende il Sole" ("The Sun shines for me"), but "E non mi scalda il viso" ("And it doesn't warm my face"). The air she breathes turns cold, and "Il sangue si raggela nelle vene" ("The blood freezes in the veins"). The one line that sounds like comfort, "Tu tremi insieme a me" ("You tremble with me"), is really two people shaking at the same threat. When the refrain returns, "Se finisce l'amore" isn't a question anymore. It's a warning: hold on, or watch the world end with it.
Mina was born Anna Maria Mazzini in Busto Arsizio, Lombardy, in 1940 and grew up in Cremona, which is why Italians still call her "la Tigre di Cremona". She started out in 1958 singing rock and roll in clubs, and within a couple of years she was all over Italian radio and television, with a three-octave voice that could go from a whisper to a roar in one phrase.
She is known for songs like "Tintarella di luna", "Se telefonando", "Grande, grande, grande" and "Parole parole", her talking duet with Alberto Lupo. In 1978 she gave her last public concert at Bussoladomani in Versilia, recorded as "Mina Live '78", and then stopped performing live for good. She moved to Switzerland and kept releasing an album almost every year from the studio, including a best-selling duet album with Adriano Celentano in 1998, and she is the only artist to top the Italian album chart in every decade since the 1960s.