the time i solved a teeny tiny mystery

an artist whose music i love dearly is lisa germano.

i got into her music around my freshman or sophomore year of high school.

one of her albums, geek the girl, uses a motif throughout, in which in the intro or outro of some tracks one can hear a jaunty little folk tune that the liner notes state is the "italian folk tune frascilita."

i happened to kind of like this folk tune the moment i heard it, and tried to search it up but searching up the term "frascilita" yielded nothing. i simply left it alone, thinking it was just an original melody that was incorporated throughout the album and promptly forgot about it.

several years later. i find this reddit post asking about the folk tune. so i wasn't the only one looking for it! unfortunately, no one else seemed to have any idea about the "italian folk tune." i tried to do a bit more googling, but still nothing. so i give up and forget about it again.

time skip again to 2023. i'm listening to some tracks off geek the girl, and i just cannot shake myself of this supposed "folk tune." so i try a bit harder to find it.

i search up italian folk music... it's a super vague and saturated search term, so i try to narrow it down… the tune is dominated by a flute or flute-like instrument, so i search "italian folk flutes". i get a hit and honestly, this should've been one of the first things i looked up. it seems so obvious in hindsight to just search up italian flutes or whatever.

so searching up "italian folk flute" yielded the result of the sicilian reed pipe called the "friscalettu." i also find that a lot of songs involving a friscalettu is called a “friscalittata.” i google for a "friscalettu" song or a "friscalittata." search on youtube and i'm still not finding the song! so in some no-so-last-ditch effort, i go to spotify.

i do some more trial and error searches, but entering “friscalittata” gets me what i want.

maybe about three or four songs down from the search results is "friscalittata twist" by giovanni greco. and it's the exact same tune that was used in geek the girl.

i'm so excited that i finally found it. i've been searching for it for years. and it's even a little embarrassing that all it took was just a little bit more digging. but i finally found it.

i dm'd the op of that aforementioned reddit post and let her know about my discovery, and she thanked me for letting her know.

finding that song was like a little ant has lifted a crumb off my shoulders.

so!!...... not a huge, crazy discovery like the ones you see hour-long video essays for on youtube, but a nice and exciting little discovery nonetheless (for me).
and one about something i cared about too… :3

if you'd like to hear the song, here it is: