Un Tempo Piccolo Lyrics in English by Tiromancino
Ingannai is the past tense of the verb ingannare, meaning "to deceive" or "to trick". It's a less common verb in everyday conversation, making it stand out.
In the song, the lyric "Ingannai il dolore con del vino rosso" (I deceived the pain with red wine) uses this word to convey a sense of actively trying to trick or outsmart sorrow, rather than just passively experiencing it. This personification of pain and the active attempt to mislead it makes the word particularly evocative and interesting.
“Diventai grande in un tempo piccolo” (I grew up in a short time) is the line the whole song hangs off, and Tiromancino spend the rest of it on what that looked like in practice: jumping out of bed, getting dressed in a hurry, disappearing into traffic like he's trying to get lost in it. He rolls uphill “as if magical,” touches the ground while staying on the edge, turns himself into a tree just to sway. It reads like someone building an adult life at speed, one improvised motion at a time.
The chorus turns that hurry into a small ritual: “Dipinsi l'anima su tela anonima” (I painted my soul on an anonymous canvas), then mixes vodka with tonic water in the very next line, as if the drink and the self-portrait belong to the same night. He eats lunch at dinnertime, talks to a book “as if to a person,” looks at the canvases with an ironic air, and gambles his memories hoping to be reborn under the stars. Then comes the line that undoes all that reinvention: he never forgot a crazy love, not even in a time this short. By the end he's deceiving the pain with red wine, throwing his heart “just anywhere,” and falling asleep to an old record among thoughts he won't say out loud.
