I was born in Potenza, a small city perched among the mountains of Basilicata. It’s not New York, it’s not Berlin, it’s not even Milan. It’s a place that many Italians wouldn’t even be able to point out on a map. But I want to tell you how this place, with all its limitations and its quietness, has profoundly shaped my music and my creative imagination.

THE PARADOX OF THE PROVINCE.

There’s something strange about growing up in a province. On one hand, you feel trapped. You look at the same streets every day, you greet the same people, and at a certain point you begin to feel a restlessness inside. That restlessness, that desire to escape, to see something else… it became my fuel.

I remember the evenings spent in my room, playing with headphones on my ears, imagining tropical beaches, American highways. Music was my ticket to places that I had only imagined in my head.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? If I had been born in Miami, I probably would never have created music that wanted to sound so Miami. I would have taken it for granted. But from Potenza, those places became magical, mythical, something to recreate note by note.

WHAT IF…?

I’ve asked myself a thousand times: what would have happened if I had been born, for example, in Milan? Would I still have become a musician? Would I have composed the same songs? Or would the urban chaos, the immediate opportunities, the frenetic life have oriented my creativity in completely different directions?

Perhaps I would have become a DJ, or a hip-hop producer, or maybe I wouldn’t have made music at all. Perhaps I would have been an architect, a lawyer, who knows. The province forces you to create your own worlds, because the real one sometimes seems too narrow.

NOSTALGIA FOR PLACES NEVER LIVED.

When I composed “Ocean Drive” or “Downtown lights”, I was evoking memories of experiences I hadn’t yet had.

From Potenza, I dreamed of the Californian coasts, car chases through the streets of a 1980s Miami that I knew only through films and TV series, the Italian discotheques of the golden years that I had only seen in old movies.

THE PROVINCE AS A CATALYST.

Reflecting on it now, I understand that Potenza wasn’t just a starting point from which I wanted to escape. It was an indispensable catalyst for my creativity. The silence of its evenings, the slowness of its rhythms, the hidden beauty of its landscapes… all of this gave me the mental space to dream.

If I had grown up in the urban chaos, with a thousand stimuli, a thousand distractions, would I have had the same need to escape through music? I’m not sure.

The province teaches you to see beyond the horizon, because the horizon is always visible, always there to remind you that there is something else beyond that line. The city, with its buildings and its lights, can sometimes make you forget that there is a “beyond”.

THE RETURN HOME.

The strangest thing is that, after years spent in Milan and Monza, when I returned on vacation to Basilicata I felt an even deeper connection with my origins. That return inspired “Mediterraneo”, one of the songs I’m most attached to.

It’s as if I had to distance myself in order to then return and see Potenza and Basilicata with new eyes, eyes that could finally appreciate what I had taken for granted.

The province shapes you in ways that you realize only when you are far from it. It gives you a unique perspective, a way of seeing the world that you carry with you always, wherever you go.

MUSIC AS A BRIDGE.

In the end, my music has become a bridge between that boy from Potenza who dreamed of other worlds and the adult who has learned to create those worlds with his own hands. A bridge between my Lucanian roots and the global influences I’ve absorbed. A bridge between reality and imagination.

And perhaps this is precisely the transformative power of art: taking what limits you and transforming it into what liberates you. Taking the everyday life of a small provincial town and transforming it into fuel for journeys without boundaries.

Potenza gave me the hunger to see something else, to create something else. It gave me the space to dream and the determination to transform those dreams into reality.

And for this, despite everything, I will always be grateful to it.