Oct 1, 2026 · 29 min · 11 segments
Chiara Barzini has spent her life navigating the literal and cultural fault lines between Italy and California. Today we will discuss her book…
Chiara BarziniGuestMia FunkHost
When I started off writing the book, it was just a little bit before the AI boom, and I was shocked to find out what all of the factories were consuming.
And then water as a weapon, as a sort of like last source of power that we have in the world.
Water in Gaza and stopping people from having access to water, you know, just it suddenly dawned upon me all the ways in which blocking access to water was a form of power.
And that conversation was one that kind of snowballed into a larger and larger conversation.
Well, I think when you're writing about California, it's very hard not to bump into misfits.
You know, I think the history of California characters is one of outlaws and misfits and pioneers and very badly behaved people.
So a big community that I was in touch with while I was on the road was the community around the Salton Sea in the desert south of Los Angeles and Bombay Beach.
The Bombay Beach Biennale is a sort of art fair that happens on the shores of what is very much a dying lake.
And it's an art fair that happens on the edge of a kind of apocalyptic scenario.
The founder, Taurus Pulley, who had an idea of recreating on the shores of a dying lake the same sense of ruin that he had perceived in ancient Rome.
When we walked along the shores and felt these pebbles under our feet, and he told me, it's not sand, it's actually fish bones.
So it was like a long mourning of something that came from another era that was asking to be mourned before we could move on to the next phase of life.
Yes, like you were saying, we do have such a complicated relationship with death today.
And I always go back to the Etruscans because they're the masters of how to die, how to die happily.
You know, the place where they would die really had such a sense of the passage.
We're terrified of diseases, we're terrified of aging, we're terrified of ailments.
And this whole trip was really about listening to what was happening in that land before all this commodification of the land.
And of course, the natives that lived, for were really smart at taking advantage of what was happening in the lake in the seasons when the lake was accessible, knowing when the flooding season would happen and retreating up in the mountains and having a more natural approach to the cycles of life.
I met this sort of mystical woman who sees the Virgin Mary in the desert of California City every first Thursday of the month.
When I started off writing the book, it was just a little bit before the AI boom, and I was shocked to find out what all of the factories were consuming.
And then water as a weapon, as a sort of like last source of power that we have in the world.
Water in Gaza and stopping people from having access to water, you know, just it suddenly dawned upon me all the ways in which blocking access to water was a form of power.
And that conversation was one that kind of snowballed into a larger and larger conversation.
Well, I think when you're writing about California, it's very hard not to bump into misfits.
You know, I think the history of California characters is one of outlaws and misfits and pioneers and very badly behaved people.
So a big community that I was in touch with while I was on the road was the community around the Salton Sea in the desert south of Los Angeles and Bombay Beach.
The Bombay Beach Biennale is a sort of art fair that happens on the shores of what is very much a dying lake.
And it's an art fair that happens on the edge of a kind of apocalyptic scenario.
The founder, Taurus Pulley, who had an idea of recreating on the shores of a dying lake the same sense of ruin that he had perceived in ancient Rome.
When we walked along the shores and felt these pebbles under our feet, and he told me, it's not sand, it's actually fish bones.
So it was like a long mourning of something that came from another era that was asking to be mourned before we could move on to the next phase of life.
Yes, like you were saying, we do have such a complicated relationship with death today.
And I always go back to the Etruscans because they're the masters of how to die, how to die happily.
You know, the place where they would die really had such a sense of the passage.
We're terrified of diseases, we're terrified of aging, we're terrified of ailments.
And this whole trip was really about listening to what was happening in that land before all this commodification of the land.
And of course, the natives that lived, for were really smart at taking advantage of what was happening in the lake in the seasons when the lake was accessible, knowing when the flooding season would happen and retreating up in the mountains and having a more natural approach to the cycles of life.
I met this sort of mystical woman who sees the Virgin Mary in the desert of California City every first Thursday of the month.
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