On Feeling Lost
Sharing music, family history, and the apprehension of the great unknown.
Written & Performed by @sofiarosaabianchi
Produced by @peddybeats
Video Editing by @sofiarosaabianchi
Filmed by @sofiarosaabianchi & @peddybeats
Episode 2
Hey guys, welcome to Episode 2 of Bianchiverse: On Feeling Lost…in the Italian Countryside. It is December 22, 2024, a rather frigid Christmas Eve Eve, writing from my parents’ house in New Jersey. Let’s jump straight in.
In this episode I’ll be doing the following…
I’ll be sharing a bit about this new song I’ve been working on
going on a tangent about compasses, and
talking about feeling Lost… In the Italian Countryside - and what this even means (lol) and the larger questions that this phenomenon brings to mind.
Before I get into all of that, I’d like to take a moment to catch you guys up on what things have been like since I launched this series about 3 weeks back. I’m very grateful, and here’s why.
Since the Launch of Bianchiverse
Since my first epsiode of Bianchiverse, I’ve had over 200 viewings of my last post, and suddenly discovered so much about the inner worlds of people whom I’ve spent the past several years surrounding myself with. Acquaintances, friends, people I thought I knew well, people I hardly knew at all. It’s like I was walking through a dark tunnel for a long time, thinking I was alone, and finally one day I realized I had a lantern in my hand and decided to turn it on, only to immediately be met with others turning their lanterns on, and for everyone to speak their presence into the tunnel, interwoven versions of, “wait, you guys are here, too?” The echos of our voices ricocheting off the walls, a cacophony of relief and shared humanity. Wow, what a beautiful feeling it’s been. I was touched to find that so many of you actually took my word for it and reached out to introduce yourself, respond to, or start a conversation around my last post. Thank you for doing that, I enjoyed listening to what you had to say. Your kindness, openness, and willingness to share, has meant everything to me.
Oh god here comes the compass tangent
This gives me a lot of faith in the direction I’m heading into, even though I so often feel like I’m lost. Maybe I’m lost in the sense that someone feels lost when they have no cell service, no GPS, not even a paper map to cling to (remember those?)… but they are indeed equipped with the only navigation equipment they really need: a good old-fashioned compass. It’s a simple, beautiful, mysterious device, and yet it’s enough to guide someone through an unexplored pocket of the remotest corners of the wilderness.
In that sense, I’m not 100 percent lost, not really. Because the little elegant glass circle in my palm reassures me that I’m moving in the right direction, even though I’ve never been to where I’m going before, and I have no sense of what I’m to encounter along the way. I can trust that the direction I’m headed into is grounded in something real; even if it is an invisible, mysterious magnetic force in my midst beckoning me and my compass forward, which the little glass circle in my palm extends its arm towards in response, reaching out to try and touch this guardian angel creature that only it can see, can feel.
Intellectually I know that there’s a science behind the way that compasses work, all to do with the Earth’s magnetic fields and things like that. But it still seems like magic to me, moreso than any modern technology does. Compasses are like these weird, intuitive, highly sophisticated living beings who practice witchcraft, and camouflage themselves to look like inorganic, ordinary, brainless manmade household objects.
When I was a kid, I used to believe that my toys would come alive when I left the room, just like in Toy Story, and I would even talk to them as if I knew this already, as if I was indeed “in” on the fact that they needed me to keep it a secret. In the middle of a one-sided conversation between me and my dolls on a Tuesday afternoon, after a long awkward pause, seven year old me would be like, you guys are running a business, I get it. I sort of wonder if compasses do the same thing as the toys, the whole coming-alive thing, but there’s a whole de-camoflaugication component as well. At night they de-camoflauge themselves, returning to their true organic form, and then they go to compass conferences where they all gossip about all of the people in the world and their journeys and destinations, about places on Earth that they’ve traveled to with us, and the places where all we people need to be, ect; developing large organized ways of doing absolutely everything in their power to help us humans to not get lost. Because for some strange reason, even though humans are like the worst, most destructive animals ever, the compasses of the world are committed to helping us out in not getting lost.
Or, maybe, they just want to travel the world, and they know that by helping us humans to navigate it, they’ll get to go on our adventures with us. Just like dogs. Dogs are like, Sick deal! You’ll feed me and take care of me and take me on adventures with you, and I don’t have to do ANYTHING in return, except stare at you and get pets and and live in your house rent free? People are always saying how dogs are dumb, dumber than cats, but who takes their cats on vacation with them? They’re too mean and uncooperative. Dogs may play dumb and act stupid-happy all the time, but they actually have the right idea.
Anyway amazingly this convoluted tangent about compasses and Toy Story and feeling lost and dogs somehow brings me back to the title of today’s post: Lost…in the Italian Countryside. You’re like, Where does the “Italian countryside” part come in, though, Sofia? I’ll tell you.
Look guys I wrote a song
So yes, back to the topic at hand: I wrote a song about feeling lost. As you can probably tell by the gushing stream of words attacking you from the screen right now, kinda like a water-gun; all at once playful, coming at you from all directions, and abrasively childlike; these are thoughts which I have been developing for a LONG time. For months they’ve been bottled up in my brain, waiting for the right moment to strike. And now, here they are, bursting through the screen, spraying relentlessly, challenging people who are game to hear more, who are game to come chase me around in circles as I guide you through the meadow of chaos that is my brain.
I think about feeling lost constantly. It’s like a fetish, like I secretly like it, because I live for the drama. I humbled myself recently when I had a revelation about something I tend to do: I tend to get very annoyed and quickly lose patience with people who converse (or should I say, one-sidedly complain) in loops about solvable problems; such as choosing to love or associate themselves with people who don’t appreciate their heart; or complaining about their position in life while doing absolutely nothing to try to develop new skills which can dig themselves out of the holes that they’re in, choosing to fill the void instead with consumerism and drugs, and other forms of distraction and gluttony…However in a sense I do the exact same thing, when it comes to my own issues, which are mostly grounded in loneliness, and feeling lost. I wallow* in it, I bathe in it, I swim in it perversely, like doing the Butterfly stroke through a mud bath. I stare at it and and I romanticize it. One might even say that I lose myself in it. (*I take comfort in knowing that I’m not alone in this behavior though, Runo Plum just wrote a vibey sadgirl indie bop about doing this exact thing, shoutout to Runo Plum.)
Well, this summer I found myself doing it, too, when I wrote a song called The Countryside of Italy. There I was in the backseat of a crowded tiny Italian car, zooming through the landscapes of the motherland, probably the most beautiful place on Earth, supposed to be happy like a normal person, but instead I found myself zoning out, humming the melancholic melody of a tune that popped into my mind while staring out the window, as if I had simply absorbed it from the Diesel-fueled air whispering into my ear through an open window.
I watched as we passed hundreds, maybe thousands of abandoned houses on forgotten corners of the Italian countryside. There they stood amongst rolling hills of silvery olive trees waiting to be re-discovered, like forgotten dollhouses in heaven’s yard sale, housing stories untold. I imagined that these houses were once the proud homes to generations of families, characters, and traditions…People I’ll never meet, stories I’ll never hear, traditions I’ll never know.
It struck me, how the scene was like a mirror image of my mind as an artist…There’s tons of unfinished, abandoned projects, and half-baked ideas living up there in my mind, taking up real estate in my inner world, housing underdeveloped characters and plots and stories, and even sometimes the characters (real people) who once played a leading role in my life, their ghosts as I remember them now frozen in time, and bound to my mind’s hallways for eternity.
And so our car zipped past, poltergeisting its way through a landscape with golden fields and rolling velvety hills and emerald, spearheaded trees and sapphire-blue skies and swan-feather clouds - a land which seemed already of the past, long ago laid to rest; existing eternally by some strange magic in a heavenly ether realm of which we were trespassers, having encountered it by mistake, due to some strange detour that our GPS was taking us through. My eyes were following the abandoned homes; some to my left, some to my right, and a few in the distance; and lingering on them for as long as I could, until the structures disappeared into specks on the horizon behind us, leaving me to wonder what had happened to them, who once lived in them, what their story was, why they were now empty, and if they should ever again become the home of a new family. Or maybe instead, they would remain uninhabited, until one day their beams would become so rotten and weak, that they would cave in and fall to the earth with a great thud, giving up, the rest of the house weathering down and eroding into the dirt over spans of decades and centuries, crumbling into the soil like a collapsed paper maché sculpture, melting closer and closer towards the earth, and someday, leaving no evidence of their existence whatsoever.
The thing that scares me the most is the thought that my dreams; the things I want to create, the relationships I want to nurture, the ideas I want to articulate, the people I’d like to bring alive on the page and immortalize for generations to come…will all meet a similar fate, suffer a similar death. As time passes I fear for the dwindling lifespans of my ideas, for imagined projects dying and coming undone, for the homes I had built for particular characters in my mind, people in my life, becoming vacant and haunted by what was, or might have been. My worst fear is to die without setting these things free - to die without restoring them to their glory and inviting people inside. So, writing this song was like providing a glimpse inside my mind, inviting people to come witness this landscape for themselves, to feel just as confused and lost as I feel, but to enjoy it nevertheless.
The song goes like this:
The Countryside of Italy
My life is like the countryside of Italy
Abandoned houses on the hills that you pass on the highway and say
that could be beautiful,
too bad
Wonder what happened there,
so sad
Need to restore one, one of these days
My mind is like the countryside of Italy
Haunted houses on the hills with friendly ghosts who once lived
ideas vacated
characters erased
just an empty house and empty space
Echos on the granite walls
laughing ghosts waltz down the halls
Who were they? Guess nobody knows
Cars just pass, and time I suppose
(Instrumental Break)
My life is like the countryside of Italy
beautiful and soft until you almost feel like its all a dream
then you’re melancholy
couldn’t tell you why
the cyprus trees hold secrets in the sky
My memories are like the countryside of Italy
characters that emanate a warmth that makes you wonder if you died
and went to Heaven
met angels themselves
Is that you, Nonna?
Or is it someone else
My mind is like the countryside of Italy
Medieval towns and broken roads
So narrow that they trap you inside
People stay forever
It’s no wonder why
lost in the Italian countryside
I could stay forever
It’s no wonder why
Lost in the Italian countryside
Am I Italian Enough?
Another thing I just realized, that I would be remised not to mention - The Countryside of Italy is also, perhaps most ardently, an expression of a discrete, underlying fear that followed me throughout my trip to Italy this summer - the fear that I was losing touch with my heritage, an integral part of my identity. The fear that this part of me is becoming watered down, diluted over time, compared to those who belong to this land, now. The idea that as the years pass, and the older my Italian relatives get and the less of them who are still with us, and the more of an adult life I build for myself in the states…the less and less I feel like I belong in any way to this country anymore. The insecurity that’s been building with each visit, noticing how I’m starting to feel more and more like a tourist visiting a foreign land, as both of us; both Italy and myself; are changing with time, walking down two separate paths, becoming our own people. That perhaps by the time I have children, Italy will feel as foreign to them and to me, as if I were to have brought them to someplace completely new and disconnected from us, like to Scandinavia or something.
When I was young, after my first trip to Italy as a family, I always dreamed that I would return to live there someday, always assumed I would. I loved the simpler living, the kind people, the artwork, the appreciation for the small pleasures. When I grew older, and began discussing this openly with my parents, they were very against the idea of me studying there or moving there permanently. To them it was evil, mean, to suggest I’d want to sever myself from them and begin a new life, after all they’d sacrificed to give me and my brothers a good life. Well, great! I thought. They had sacrificed a lot, they’d achieved what they’d set out to achieve. Now, shouldn’t I have the right to enjoy that life, however I wanted to? To seize the opportunities that they’d worked so hard to provide?
When I was younger, their logic used to bother me. It wasn’t until this year, perhaps, that I’ve begun to understand. This year, I began to observe more closely how my parents have responded to the withering state of their own family members, many of them sick, bed-ridden. About ten years ago, Cancer, like a wolf, snuck into the family and began stealing relatives routinely, one after the other, greedily striking on both sides of the family. Some were taken swiftly, and without warning. Some were bitten years ago, and escaped, but the wound never healed properly, and to this day they continue to bleed out, losing every droplet of their strength with each passing day. I understand now, why there is an expectation that my parents want me to be near to them as they grow older, too; to scare off the wolves when their time comes, to hold their hands as the hairs on their heads turn silver, and their fingers, laced through mine, turn pastry-like inside my palms - pale and buttery and delicate, until someday they melt away. I can see how there is a wretchedness in me threatening not to be near them, even if I only mean for a time, while I’m still young. To that they would respond - Sure, you assume so. But life happens.
I’ve been mulling this over a lot this year, wondering if perhaps they’re right. As much as I do fear for my future in New York/New Jersey; as price of living soars, my dissonance intensifies, shopping plaza-islands on the shoulders of grey highways springing up left and right and killing me a little bit inside every time I drive past one, eating away at me like a disease; the knocking feeling to be out there living on my own, far away from my family for a period of time, for once in my life, it whispers into my ear…Now is the time, it’s time to try someplace new! Do it, do it now! I wonder how much of that is just me being a spoiled brat who, just like every other girl ever, thinks that traveling will be the answer to all of my problems, when really it’s just an escapist tactic - just me romanticizing aimlessness, romanticizing some kind of Camus-ian, L’Etranger-ian drive to avoid any form of true confrontation with the seed of my issues. Plus, I am well aware of the country’s threatening presence of fascism, the inevitability of the Mafia, and the troubling socio-economic landscape, in pretty much everywhere except for Milan. Besides, I can’t even afford to take a risk that steep at the moment, not until I pay off my student debt. Though I often remind myself that if I wanted to I actually could, but I’d be totally winging it, and I’d be taking a huge financial risk.
I can’t tell if the seed of my “flight-response” issues lives inside of me, something like a faulty, avoidant personality trait; or outside of me; an entirely natural response to the all-consuming capitalist dystopian hellscape that I’m subjected to by belonging to the present-day United States, a so called “Land of the Free.”
And so as I leaf through the pages of the book that is my life, a knot forms in my throat as I find that the plot is driving me further and further away from this dream of moving back to Italy someday, that I once held onto with such conviction. (By the way, in the spirit of Christmas - How very George Bailey of me.) I become more and more reluctant to keep reading, pressing one eye shut as I turn to the next page, the page-turning cadence slowing down, slower, even slowwweeeerrrr…until finally! I fling the book across the room and watch as is smacks the wall, collapsing to the floor like a dead bird. But the thing is like, aren’t I the one writing the book, the story of my life? Why am I acting like I am just a passive reader who doesn’t like where the story is going, when there’s literally a pen in my hand that I’m not using?
Anyway. It was strange, how reconnecting with the land of my ancestors this summer could actually make me feel further from them than I had ever felt. All at once I felt both the longing to return and and to put lights on inside of one of those abandoned homes; and the fear that I would never get a chance to, that instead I’d just spend the rest of my life zooming past this possibility on a highway, wistfully wondering about what might have been, and admiring its beauty from a distance, as the world changes around us.
Maybe in the end, neither path is any better than the other. In one reality I’d move to Italy, restore an abandoned country home to its former glory, make new friends, and my kids would be the weird American-immigrants in school…but they’d hardly know their grandparents, I’d grow apart from my brothers over time, reminiscing from time to time about how we used to be so damn close, once upon a time, in our youth, in New Jersey - when we quoted the same movies, and talked each other through relationships on moonlit summer nights in the pool in our backyard, watched Star Wars in the living room together on Thanksgiving, had inside jokes about the quirky things our parents did. Only then would I realize how great my life had been back then. I’d grow apart from my friends in the states and I’d just be the writer-music-dancer girl they once knew who lives in Italy now, that they lost touch with. Maybe some would make it over from time to time, and we would have warm, beautiful dinners and they would compliment me on the restoration that I’ve completed and we would both wish that they could stay forever, but they would only ever stay for several days at a time in the end, once a year or every couple of years. Either that, or I set the example and make the move, and my brothers and parents are soon to follow, and we’d all completely start over, together…but knowing my family, that would be like pulling teeth, so highly unlikely.
In another reality I stay here, rough it out for a few years, and then someday things start to get easier. I publish a few books, release my music, get to perform it with friends in front of engaged audiences, move into a nice apartment. Prices in New York are still sky-high and people are becoming even more vapid, but I do everything in my power to keep my kids grounded, which I know I will, because I am maternal and nurturing in that way. My kids are more New Yorkers than they are Italians or New Jersians. When I take them to Italy, their mother speaks poor Italian and we get made fun of, but then they get to go back to school and talk about their adventures. The kids get just as depressed as I do on car rides visiting New Jersey, where we pass grey shopping plazas and grey roads and power-plants spewing chemical filth into the air, giving all of us cancer, in due time. One of my daughters is a creative anxiety-ridden basket case like me, and I suddenly know the pain that I put my mother through for all of those years. One day, as adults, we revisit Italy as a family once again, and on a sunny ride through the countryside one afternoon, my eyes flicker into the rearview mirror and land on my daughter, her face drenched in sun, gracefully resting her chin in one hand, her sad, sodden eyes somewhere else, entranced, fighting an inner battle that I know all too well.
I guess in a way, both paths are beautiful, both melancholy - just different.
What it’s been like to develop this song
I wrote this song on a late August afternoon in about ten minutes in my head, and then I sat there in the back seat typing it into my notes app as we (literally) got lost driving across the country from Tuscany, all the way to Puglia, otherwise known as the “heel” of the boot, where my mother’s family is from. I very quietly hummed it into my phone so that I would remember the melody, and then I brought it to my multi-talented friend Pedram at Gonzo Studios in New York, upon my return.
I came to Pedram with my feeble humming and the base chords scratched into a spiral notebook on a Wednesday night in November, and he magically downloaded the information into his fingers, and about thirty seconds later he was playing the whole song as if he had known it all his life. We recorded the whole thing in about an hour, myself on vocals and Pedram on keys, and what you’re hearing in this clip is that last verse of the song. About a month later I went through my camera footage from this summer and spent the hours of like 11pm-3am one Saturday night putting this video together in CapCut, stitching clips together, syncing the right image sequences to specific moments in the song, intuitively applying a selective usage of digital effects; blurring the footage sporadically to make it look like patchy memories and sparse moments of recollection.
A first version of the song is fully recorded. I’ve since changed a few lines in the middle to match the lyrics I’ve presently shared. Before putting this out on any streaming platforms, I’ll have to get back in the studio and record the vocals again, or maybe we’ll just stick to what we have.
Closing Remarks
The Countryside of Italy is about a lot of things, but I think it’s mostly about loss, and the experience of feeling lost - loss of potential, loss of oneself, loss of innocence, loss of a dying generation of people...lost in moments, lost in landscapes, lost in the important choices one must make…and the beauty in loss, too - the tearful smile that it happened. It’s about finding oneself in moments of time that feel so dream-like, so elusive, that you’re scared you’ll never be able to immortalize them; through a photo, a song, a piece of literature. It’s about the subsequent desire to remain lost in moments like this forever, surrendering to the fact that you’ll perhaps never be able to quite capture them the way that they once were.
I fear that those abandoned houses out there in the countryside of Italy might never house a family again. That it is not actually possible to resuscitate them - that they are shells left behind that belong to a generation that is not only dying, but indeed already dead. Unless someone like me were to get her act together, and to climb down out of her own head, and to make the money and to fall in love and to build the family and to come to the rescue someday, even if I’m retired, even if life has already happened for me, and it’s in the last chapter of my life, that I do the work of salvaging the home, of restoring it back to a state capable of incubating family, life, and love stories, once again.
Anyway, speaking of getting out of one’s head, that’s all for today. Jesus, I’ve probably talked you into a depression spiral! Go watch a stupid Adam Sandler movie or like Toy Story or something (stick to 1 or 2, DEFINITELY NOT 3) you’ll feel better. Or, ooh! (my favorite) Shrek! Or better yet, Shrek the Halls!
Thank you for staying with me for the whole episode. I hope you enjoyed the song, and I hope you have a great holiday. The next time I publish will probably be some time in the New Year. Until then, if you get lost a little, don’t forget to enjoy it.
Your Friend,
Sofia
Contact Info
As always, I love getting to know my readers. You can to reach out to me anytime by dm-ing me on insta, or introducing yourself in email at hisofiabianchi@gmail.com.