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Recently, I´ve been listening to Laura Pausini´s song Scatola and there is a sentence in the lyrics that I don´t really understand from a gramatical point of view.
In the very middle of the song she says Ma io non ti ho dimenticata instead of Ma io non ti ho dimenticato. Why is this? She (Laura) is a girl that is talking to his boyfriend and, therefore, the gender of the participio should be aligned with the pronoun ti (male) and not with the subject io (female). Am I right?
I don't know about that particular song, but you are absolutely right that, talking to a man (or in general anything which is grammatically masculine), the correct form should be ti ho dimenticato (or guardato or mangiato or whatever), regardless of the sex or gender of the speaker.
(By the way, Italian grammar is more lenient if the object is feminine: in that case both ti ho dimenticata and ti ho dimenticato are considered correct in modern Italian.)
EDIT: It's perhaps useful to remark that in a different use of the verb dimenticare it does agree with the subject's gender. The verb can be used as if it were a reflexive verb, dimenticarsi. In this case, one would say mi sono dimenticato di te (if the speaker is a male) or mi sono dimenticata di te (if the speaker is a female). Note also the different auxiliary verb, essere rather than avere.
Io ho un'altra spiegazione, perché ho letto il testo della canzone di Laura Pausini.
Non ti ho dimenticata non si riferisce a un boyfriend, ma la canzone è un duetto tra due donne, due amiche di gioventù, che ricordano la loro vecchia amicizia e si dicono "Io non ti ho dimenticata".
An Italian can correct me if I'm wrong, but I hypothesize that she's using the unusual form to emphasize that she's talking to a woman, specifically, herself.
Scatola is the theme song to the film/documentary Laura Pausini - Piacere di conoscerti, and she explained about the song, "Mi sono rivista adolescente, ho ripensato ai sogni che avevo e a quella che sono oggi, cercando un punto di incontro."
In the film, she imagines what life would have been like if she hadn't won San Remo and told her mom she felt like two people, the one that listened to her mom and avoided fame, and the one that listened to her dad and pursued music.
When she says, "We're the same thing (siamo la stessa cosa)," she's taking to her younger self before stardom, and means it quite literally.
That doesn't explain her finding "your" cell number and trying to reach you, BUT, Laura doesn't write her songs from scratch. She finds songs that resonate with her and adapts them to her personal circumstances (like La Solitudine: the song was written - she just had to change "Anna" to "Marco" and it became her story).
Like any good storyteller, maybe she left some of the original lyrics so the listener could interpret it a different way and see themselves in the song.
