At the Sanremo Festival 2026, Ermal Meta thrilled us with his Little starone of the very few “busy” songs as they were once defined. The title recalls a sweet, familiar, almost reassuring nursery rhyme. But the piece does not accompany sleep: it interrupts it. It is an upside-down lullaby, with sustained sounds that intertwine Latin and Balkan influences, designed to tell of a childhood that knows no respite.
But there is a detail that struck everyone during his performance on the Ariston stage and led us to wonder who he was referring to. Only one word could be seen written on the collar of his shirt: Amal. No slogans, no immediate explanations. Just a name, sewn with discretion but impossible to ignore and not notice. Amal is an Arabic term that means hope, but the artist dedicated it symbolically to all the girls of Gaza. A gesture that transforms the dress into a message.
A little girl with no name
Why all this? To understand it you need to understand the meaning of the song that Meta – a singer-songwriter who is never banal in the themes he deals with – brings to the Festival this year. Little star in fact, it speaks of an interrupted life. A story that does not focus on a specific face, but on an absence that can have many names. After the performance, the singer-songwriter explained his intent on social media:
The protagonist of ‘Stella Stellina’ is a little girl with no name, but perhaps she has all the names. Aysha, Amal, Layla, Nour, Hind, who cares, maybe nothing, maybe everything. Daughters of no one, daughters of everyone.
On Radiodue, the artist explored the meaning of that embroidery:
I chose the names of Palestinian girls who died during what happened and continues to happen. I had the names sewn in my handwriting, each name should perhaps be carved. It’s a very confusing thought because it excites me a lot.
Meta made a very specific, symbolic but very powerful choice: to bring a different name on stage every evening, sewn onto the dress, so as not to let it remain invisible. A repeated, almost ritual gesture, to prevent those lives from remaining anonymous.
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The intimate origin of the song
The inspiration for writing the song didn’t come from watching TV news and news, but at home when her one and a half year old daughter Fortuna started repeating the words of the famous nursery rhyme that we all know well:
The real inspiration comes from my daughter, who recently started speaking. One day he repeated ‘Stella Stellina’, the lullaby that everyone knows. I picked up the guitar and in half an hour the song was born. Those words started to have a different meaning.
Then, however, a broader reflection began. Those light words took on another burden, that of the images seen on social media, marked as “sensitive content”. Among all, the face of a little girl from Gaza that remained imprinted in Meta:
I imagined a hill from which we await a new spring, a rebirth, serenity and the end of wars.
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The Deeper Meaning of “Star Star”
And so here we are at the meaning of this passage and also of the name embroidered on the shirt: Little star talks about a little girl “without a name”, but precisely for this reason capable of representing them all. The text evokes a broken life “between walls and sea”, images that directly refer to the reality of Gaza, where childhood coexists with the noise of bombs.
The song moves in a fragile space: that of the question. How do you explain evil to a child? How do you translate horror into understandable words, when adults themselves struggle to find them? Meta tries to respond with music. The lullaby becomes a way to remain human, to not look away. On the Ariston stage, between lights and applause, that embroidered name reminds us that hope is not an abstract concept. It’s a proper name: Amal.
At the end of the performance, Carlo Conti also underlined the meaning of the song, calling for a peace that we all hope will arrive as soon as possible. Words that we also make our own, in the hope that they will soon become reality:
May the flowers be just for partying and not on the graves of children who have nothing to do with the follies of men.
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