Cobalto refers to the color cobalt blue. It's a less common, more specific color than just "blue," making it more interesting and evocative.
In the song, Elisa sings "Nei cieli di cobalto c'è un senso di te" (In the cobalt skies there's a sense of you). This imagery paints a vivid picture of a deep, intense blue sky, suggesting a profound and expansive feeling of connection to another person. It elevates the common idea of a blue sky to something more poetic and memorable.
The singer is standing right at the edge of something. One step from what is possible, one step from the person she is singing to, and not moving. What holds her there is not the other person but herself: fear of deciding, fear of who she is, fear of everything she does not know and does not have.
Then the song turns. Instead of naming the feeling, she points at where she keeps finding it. Flowers pushing up through asphalt. A cobalt sky. A dream at the bottom of a cry. A day that stays silent. In every one of them there is a sense of you.
The title says it plainly. Eppure sentire means "and yet, to feel", and the Italian verb sentire covers hearing, sensing and feeling all at once. That is why a song about someone who is not there can still be full of things you can touch and see.
Elisa, born Elisa Toffoli in 1977 in Trieste in northeastern Italy, is one of the country's most acclaimed singer-songwriters. She grew up in the border town of Monfalcone, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, where hearing many languages early on shaped her rare gift for singing across them.
She debuted in 1997 with the album Pipes & Flowers and, unusually for an Italian artist, built her early career writing and singing mostly in English. Her breakthrough came in 2001, when she won the Sanremo Music Festival with "Luce (Tramonti a nord est)", her first song in Italian, co-written with Zucchero. The song became her first number one at home and remains one of the most beloved Italian pop ballads of its era.