Travels in the 1950s ... I was ten years old when I began to discover Europe and for more than ten years we travelled through Europe by car.
1956. Goodbye to yellowed lace on the headrests of the seatbacks in Second Class, the caresses of metal springs on bare skin, goodbye to the creaking wooden slats of the seats in Third Class and the busted and sagging luggage racks. No goodbye however for First Class which we had never known.
For now she – the FIAT 600 – was here and we no longer travelled by train. We followed routes with Europe flowing before us, a Europe that was changing slowly after the drama of the war, with more or less difficulty in relation to the intensity with which each country had lived through that drama. Thus we discovered a France and an England which, despite having undergone great suffering, got back on their feet quite quickly, putting behind them ruins and bad memories. Austria, on the other hand, in 1957 still retained fresh memories of its vicissitudes among the ruins and rubble of Vienna, its vanquished capital. Italy, too, had got back on its feet in different ways and at a differing pace in the South, Centre and North. Year after year, we witnessed the transformation of the Italian motorway network. We first discovered the A1, then the A14 and many others after that.
A retrospective bird’s eye view over the different stages of those trips reveals many threads of ideal connections, traced in many years of European history, by the cultural upheavals and the personalities that gave it life. The threads that link distant places and people unknown to one another, are the paths that unite Denmark’s Elsinore – with its castle haunted by the royal ghost created in Shakespeare’s imagination – with the small English town of Stratford which jealously preserves the house that was the playwright’s birthplace, and fan out as far as Verona with Juliet’s balcony and tomb, and then to the nearby Venice of Desdemona. From Canova’s Temple and Museum in Possagno to the Museum of Thorvaldsen – the Danish sculptor who had fallen in love with Canova’s art in Rome – in Copenhagen. Pellico’s odyssey from Venice’s Piombi prison to the salons of his imperial foes in the Schombrunn Castle in Vienna and the cell in the Spielberg fortress in Moravia. The ghost of Napoleon haunting every corner of Elba, looming over the solitary plain at Auschwitz, solemn in Les Invalides in Paris. For those young enough, there was also a Europe of fairy tales to discover, ranging from the gloomy atmosphere of the Brothers Grimm with Tom Thumb and Hansel and Gretel lost in the thick Black Forest, to the light fantasy of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty among the blackbirds of Ussè, a fantasy that turns darker among the ridges of Chambord with the terrible Bluebeard.
We also discovered in the different legs of those journeys the narrative of Italian emigration, the departures of the 1950s and 1960s, with a graph of suffering varying from one European region to another.
Setting off from the Salento region, the too familiar landscape seemed boring to us, the never-ending vineyard rows monotonous, with the bunches of black grapes already nearly ripe, and uninteresting seemed the silvery expanses of olive foliage coming into view through the golden mists over the humid red earth. Years would pass before we understood the richness of that landscape.
From the tip of the Boot up, up and up again, that unknown and unfamiliar Boot of which few beyond Puglia had any information.. The LE on the licence plate…? Did it stand for Lecco? Lecce? Where? Ah...the Puglie! There was no Autogrill yet – just a boiled egg and a few biscuits to keep hunger at bay until stopping for a picnic lunch. This was the happening we looked forward to not for what was eaten, but for the way it was eaten and where it was eaten. We discovered the peaches of the Trentino – we had never seen yellow peaches with velvety skin – and then the incredible variety of cheeses Germany had, with pepper, paprika, wurst-flavoured, eaten on the banks of the Rhine. The enormous flanfromage purchased in Kaiserslautern, the jars bought in Switzerland out of which rolled enormous strawberries soaked in a delicious syrup (the brand was Hero’s) were unforgettable. In Sweden, we flung ourselves into an orgy of smorrebrod, the enormous mysterious canapés with impossible spreads – were they shrimp, fish eggs? There were snack breaks on the banks of the Rhine at the foot of a trellis, lunches by cold babbling brooks, and near an elegant fountain spring of the Papal period of the 1500s in Lazio.
We went up and down with our Fiat 600, snaking among the many trucks, old and rusty.
It was an Italy that still had to be rebuilt, with the State motorways that were narrow and unpaved, a crooked sign here and there for directions and milestones on the sides to indicate where we were and where we were going. The road-works were carried out by scrawny groups of workers, roasted by the sun and with a damp knotted handkerchief on their heads, who handed over a dusty red rag to the first automobile in the queue to be given back at the end of the strip of road under construction.
The Alpine State motorways with the steep roads with sharp curves which made you stiff and petrified with fear, looking down over the sheer overhang as a truck came toward you, with the road surface deprived of asphalt by the winter ice. This was the Gottardo and the Spluga, the Sempione and the Tarvisio ... no problem.
A small touch of magic was proffered by the evening fireflies in the bushes alongside the roads. When a few years had passed, the sparkle along the roadside that lighted up the evening darkness, came from fragments of glass … there were no longer any fireflies.
Austria and Switzerland were our early destinations. Little wooden houses with colorful balconies, made cheerful with fragrant bluebells wafting their honeyed perfume in the air. Then there were the signs stuck on the façades, incomprehensible at first: “Zimmer”, “Zimmerfrei”, “Gasthof”. We resigned ourselves to the lack of shutters at the windows, as well as the incredible duvets which were virtually enormous cushions to put over our bodies, and we didn’t easily get used to the early morning awakening, which was however cheered by breakfasts never before seen: teapots, teacups, little bowls, fragrant bread rolls, cream, butter, milk fat of an unfamiliar flavour, aromatic jams, and a very watery coffee – the only flaw.
The streets of Vienna were dominated by the blackened façades of imposing palaces, nothing beyond the blind windows, just the heaps of rubble left by the bombings. It was 1957 and the last contingents of the Red Army had left only a year before. There was beer on tap to drink, and there was also Slivovitz, but it was useless to read the menu, or rather, it was difficult to find one. The nudelsuppe was really nude and sad-looking, lacking in everything, even the circles in a soup made of bouillon cubes. Then there was kartoffeln, kartoffeln and again always kartoffeln, and sometimes wurstel, always enfolded in the odour of sauerkraut. What saved us were the apfeltorten, the incomparable apple cakes. The sachertorte was rare. Then there was the sadness and a sense of oppression, of apprehension perhaps. Even the Danube seemed to flow sadly.
There was a different atmosphere in Salzburg, aristocratic, gay, cultivated and pleasure-seeking, enlivened with the presence of great numbers of tourists but also by smiling and refined frau and fraulein. To us the concerts in the snug squares of the city were something quite new and different to bands that played at the festivals of our patron saints. We also discovered the puppet show with fairytales set to music by the Greats, with the most elegant and refined of marionettes that “acted” by singing as tenors and sopranos.
We crossed Switzerland almost every year. Everything was always and everywhere clean and tidy – the typical image of Switzerland was not to be belied. It was a country which had not been involved in the war, a war that had left misery and ruin behind it. It had thus gone forward, so much so that it was able to offer work to great numbers of Italians from southern Italy. We met them everywhere and there was a tinge of homesickness in their questions, in their approaches, but it wasn’t the suffering of those we encountered in other European countries. On the return trip to Italy, custom required us to stuff a pack of cigarettes into our suitcases, even if none of us smoked, and then jam and chocolate and to fill up with petrol before reaching Chiasso. We always passed through customs with our hearts thumping because of those “sins”.
On the German autobahn. The impact of that ribbon running straight and monotonously through the Black Forest was disconcerting, while you were hammered with the rhythmic purr that made you sleepy. Here, however, the customs officers were severe and suspicious. Baggage, green card and passport were always meticulously examined by many eyes and many hands.
Mannheim, Dusseldorf, Cologne. The mantle of grey above presaged the factories. The South Italy licence plate attracted small crowds of Italian emigrants, with uncertain smiles and dialect speech, and questions, questions, a great many questions. The autobahn brought us into the Rhine Valley, and we travelled along the river by boat, imagining the lass Lorelei amid the deafening siren calls of the barges. We spent the nights in the cosy Gasthof standing tall over the river, with their terraces set for an intriguing breakfast.
These were all aspects of a vivacious Germany which was not wasting any time bewailing the sins and misery of a recent war, but the Berlin problem was still entangled and the dramatic escapes from the East continued. And the East remained an unknown world. We went to Berlin, curious to understand and discover such a distant reality.
We drove along an endless motorway through East Germany. Vopos armed with machine guns and cannons pointing from the top of the ramparts towards the motorway route required absolute prudence. We would not even have stopped for petrol if it had not been necessary: traffic was thin, the petrol station silent with a single person at the pump. We could never have imagined that that place had a surprise in store for us, a little machine never before seen. We managed to make it work by inserting a little coin into it and it became a miraculous fountain for our thirst, a fresh fizzy orange drink produced by an unknown firm – Fanta. We had been familiar only with the San Pellegrino brand.
When we arrived in Berlin we felt relieved. We passed the three Allied checkpoints – French, English and the American Checkpoint Charlie – with no problem, but the worst was to come with the last checkpoint, the Russian one. They made us get out of the car, they searched it from top to bottom using every means. At that point, we were able to go into West Berlin, a lifeless and gloomy city, grey under a thin rain, with few people and few cars in the streets and the Under den Linden boulevard was sad and bare. The church stump – that is, what remained of the Church of the Commemoration after it was bombed – remained there in everlasting memory of what it once had been. We climbed up a small wooden tower to look beyond the Wall, the Wall which ran before us – grey and unpitying – through the city suffocating the view and the heart. Beyond, the Vopos marched with heavy step right beneath the Wall, and the rain fell to complete the sadness of the part of the city we managed to view from up above, neglected and lifeless. We have no photographs of that day. It would have been too dangerous to snap a shot of that scene.
At the exit from Berlin our innocent tourist baggage – suitcases and straw bags – was thrown up into the air; the bottom of the car was inspected by means of a mirror attached to a long pole, for there too a fugitive might be hiding. Then they sent us on our way and our panic came to an end. Cars with local licence plates were more suspect, and they were shut up in a garage, taken apart and searched piece by piece. A thoughtful silence accompanied us on the way back over that desolate motorway. Almost thirty years were to pass before the year 1989 brought down the Wall, and great numbers were to die in their attempts to flee the East.
From Germany to Belgium 1958. Benelux, a name that alluded to light and spoke to us of an easy border. The Saar River and the Moselle, which had just survived a flood, heavy rain and mud, the memory of a gloomy landscape. We met great numbers of Italians there. A bridge over the Saar which no longer existed, and under us, immersed in the murky water stood Italian labourers with their arms outstretched. It seemed to us that it was they who were holding up the support beams.
The climate of Belgium already made you sad: rain, showers, a few drops, grey skies, cloudy skies. In that part of Europe the living conditions of the emigrants seemed harder than in other places. Marcinelle was near us both in terms of time and of space.

We were surprised by the language of the Belgians: “Namur ?” we would ask in French. “Ah, oui, Namen!” they would reply in Flemish. The same surprise, a little bitter for us Italians, a little later in ex-Jugoslavia, in the Slovenia area: “Postumia ?”, “No, Postojna”. On the road signs you now read “Postojna”in Slavic and no longer in Italian. “Rijeka” was Fiume.
Waterloo continued to be written exactly as we had read it in the history books, but the prints which depicted that epic day did not picture a green plain; it seemed boundless, with soft hills, with that lion hoisted high. But then again, Napoleon was perhaps more present there than in the delightful locales of the Isle of Elba where, according to the ubiquitous signs, “Napoleone…slept….ate”. Finally Bruxelles, or rather Brussels, and we discovered Saint Gudula, a name that remained shut in our mouths if we pronounced it in French.
Then to Expo ’58, following the metallic flashing of the Atomium spheres. Our experience had been limited at the Levant Fair which already overwhelmed us with its size, but this was a city within a city. The guys at Philips had turned to Le Corbusier to showcase their production. The United States presented the grandfather – or the great-grandfather – of the computer, a monumental device double the size of one of our refrigerators.
With 1961, Italy was ready to celebrate a hundred years of national unity, and “Italia ‘61” was created in Turin – a fair, a park, an exposition of science and technology. But there were also the history pavilions, of the history of Italian Unification, and Garibaldi had the space he deserved dedicated to him. There were smiling hostesses to welcome and inform. Italy’s economic boom of those years had found its most suitable showcase: the economic miracle of the Reconstruction had exploded for all the world to see and admire.
It was precisely in 1961 that our group of incompetents – in the certainty that Europe (with six member states) had eliminated all paper bureaucracy at the borders – arrived at customs in San Luigi with two underage children without documents. Of course we had to go back disappointed (there were six of us in the 600).
The geometric fields of Holland were of a green that was never the same: rhombi, squares, rectangles, oats, rye, all the shades of the one colour, then cows, great numbers of cows out to pasture. We met the old fishermen of Spakenburg. Their faces were a light bronze colour – the Nordic sun does not burn like the sun of the South – seated on the parapets of canal bridges or on the edges of beached barges. They stayed there in silence or exchanged few words with their pipes between their teeth, all dressed the same, in faded blue jackets covering wide trousers of the same colour, dark berets, and enormous rough wooden clogs. All around there was a kind of cawing, the endless creaking of bicycles, beautiful and imposing, circulating through the streets of the little town. That was the only traffic.
In 1964, Amsterdam, deep in the silence of the canals caressed by the green of the willows, was not yet the land of liberalized drugs. And no-one had heard anything of Maastricht, barely touched by our itinerary, the small capital of Limburgh, decentralized, on the border with Belgium. Instead, it was precisely from those Norman lands that in the 12th century the giant Chiliano came down into Italy with his men at the service of the Norman king. He was from Limburgh and came as far as the threshold of our own home, Lecce, and his loyalty was rewarded with a duchy in the Salento region and his clear legacy survives still in the fair hair and blue eyes of great numbers of Salentine children. To this day, Chiliano – a solemn warrior – dominates, over his southern fief.
In France in the 1950s, destination Ville Lumière, the directions for the airport were still for “Orly” and not for “Charles De Gaulle” because le Génèral was still in his place. Whenever one arrived in Paris, one lost one’s way in the intricacies of the corridors of the Louvre on a timeless visit. At the entrance we were received by the majestic Nike of Samothrace that by now had become a familiar entity. There were still no crystal pyramids in the courtyard. Then, Paris seen from the Seine on the bateau mouche, the mandatory stops from Notre Dame to the Champs Elyseés, the top of the Tour Eiffel, and on to the Invalides in memory of Napoleon, covering a lot of distance on foot, on up to Montmartre to look at the white cupolas of the Sacre Coeur with our noses up in the air. Then there was the disappointment of the Moulin Rouge for those who knew it through Toulouse Lautrec and la Goulue: cold and anonymous modernity illuminated with neon on a desolate, hot and muggy August afternoon. We felt moved at the Pére Lachaise cemetery; the Greats really were there. When we returned in 1968, we were surprised by the crowds of tourists queuing up everywhere: to go into the Louvre, to go up the Tour Eiffel, there was a long wait along the Seine in front of the used-book stalls. Mass tourism had arrived, greatly desired but not always desirable. In that year, I discovered the Sorbonne. In summer it was half empty and those who happened to be there by chance were in a hurry to get away. The Parisian University was a building that made you feel out of time: upon entering those walls you felt the weight of the tradition of European knowledge on your shoulders. There was no hint of the explosion which would soon – in the Spring of ’68 – create upheaval in the lecture halls, the streets and squares of Paris and Europe.
The trip through the Loire Valley amid vineyards, wine cellars, woods and castles brought us into the fantasy world of Perrault. When a mass of chimneys in the middle of a green wood appeared, it was the fairytale of Bluebeard, a room for each wife murdered, we were at Chambord. A thick wood, gloomy silence around the castle: the Sleeping Beauty was slumbering there, and it was the castle of Ussé..
At Calais we gave a glance to the little shop windows offering “dentelles de Calais” before embarking for Dover to discover the England of ’64.
The urban planning and architecture of London districts was not to our taste then as individualistic southerners. Streets ran along uniform and all the same; in Kensington identical white façades between the neoclassical and colonial styles. There was even the danger of making a mistake and going into the house of someone else. A few decades later, even more anonymous and never-ending attached townhouses would fill our city’s outskirts. Fleet Street was still the “newspaper street”; there were 278 newspapers with their offices located there. Then on to a visit of the Gothic architecture of the English religion, in the coloured light of the stained glass windows of Westminster and Canterbury and a long conversation in Latin with a young bespectacled priest. For those young enough, the greatest attraction was Carnaby Street; it was the year of Mary Quant’s coming on the scene with the little big invention of the miniskirt. There was an entirely new world opening up in Carnaby Street, completely overwhelming for anyone coming from the provinces. Little shops enveloped in the music of the Beatles, slim blonde girls, shameless copies of the diaphanous Twiggy – the icon of those years – chattered among themselves without paying attention to probable customers; scanty clothes on sale arranged haphazardly. Incredible! You served yourself!
We soon realized how difficult it was to eat in England once breakfast time was over and so we adapted, when, still sleepy-eyed, we were served plates of bacon and eggs with a heavy odour, pitchers of orange juice and a lot of other things unacceptable to us who were dearly fond of a quick cup of coffee. Harrod’s too was a great novelty for us, the great stores not yet touched by the kitsch of the Al Fayed era. Seated on the high stools in front of a counter, we tasted for the first time shrimp in pink sauce served on a leaf of lettuce in stemmed bowl. Then there were the visits to the traditional manor houses, from Hampton Court with its parks filled with deer and the souvenirs of Henry VIII’s stay, to Blenheim Palace, the residence of the dukes of Marlborough. Winston Churchill had uttered his first cry there and taken his first steps. But the pound, like the Danish crown and the Swedish one as well, made it impossible for our lira to withstand them and the trip was of short duration. The atmosphere was intense on our visit to Oxford, a timeless place. There were no summer students there and there was great quiet in the lecture halls with their austere furnishings and on the expanse of green lawns. It was hard to imagine the kids of Carnaby Street moving and studying in that milieu or, incredibly, wearing the ancient “uniform” with cap and gown.
Then in the Northern countries of the 1960s, the guiding lights of the modernity of the period: Swedish kitchens, formica, nudity, design, futurist lines – architecture learnt its lessons from the Nordic Masters.
In Copenhagen, we paid homage to the sweetly sinuous Mermaid, but also to the hard and stocky Fishwife; in Odense, Andersen’s house seemed to have come out of a fairytale, with its stork (a real one!) perched on top of the chimney.
Sweden was on the other side of an arm-length’s distance of sea. Forest, the expanse of lakes in the distance, then Jonkeping, Lindkoping, Norrkoping, it seemed like you were always in the same place, with similar sounds and rarefied landscapes always the same. But then there was the unexpected and overwhelming impact of the infrastructures on the outskirts of Stockholm and our own beautiful “del Sole” Motorway seemed light years away. Eight interchange junctions, elevated branches, roundabouts, bridges… and signs in Swedish – an endless blind labyrinth that left us shaken and confused. But the organization for welcoming tourist was incomparable. An Italian cobbler approached us, happy in his proper workshop near the Railway Station. In resignation we consented to feeding ourselves with inexpensive smorrenbrod, the huge canapés filled with everything imaginable, but what exactly we never knew. One evening we made a discovery: a little white van, a little man with a white hat and a soft hot bun filled with a fragrant roasted sausage; we had never tasted a similar delicacy in Mediterranean lands.
We discovered the shock of Stockholm’s Saturday nights – halfway between the nocturnal movida of one of today’s cities and a collective drunkenness which brought together young people, mature professionals and office-workers. Of Sweden we learned afterwards that it was the land of suicides.
We went to Hungary just ten years after the 1956 occupation by the Soviets, the one we had seen in the photo-reports in “Epoca” with tanks on the cover. When we entered Hungarian territory, time seemed to have stopped at that date, covered by an invisible vault. After crossing the border, there were little country houses, on the chimney tops there were storks’ nests, storks brooding on their eggs, little wooden carts with high sides drawn by robust horses, with enormous barrels of wine, white geese honking blocked the way for cars. Then, endless puszta.
Higher up, a new road brought to Budapest, an imposing city, grey and numb, almost hostile. We tasted the “palacintke” garnished with walnut jam and the creamiest of chocolate. They were really nothing more than crepes folded in four, but we knew only our indelicate frittatine. We tourists were permitted to make purchases with a certain currency created for the purpose to be spent only in a particular chain of shops, inaccessible to Hungarians. Our search for Budapest by night for the young brought us to listen to gypsy music in the midst of purple lace and velvet. But there was also another Budapest – of great public works, essential lines, advanced technology, a football stadium with bold lines and an enormous stylized clock, high above the stairs. The private sphere had failed to go forward, while the public was leap-frogging.
In Czechoslovakia of the same year, 1966, there was a different atmosphere, the Prague Spring was already in the making and was to explode after a little over a year, in January 1968.
In Moravia, Brno, or Brunn, or Brn? We never knew. At the foot of the ill-famed fortress of Spielberg, a lovely city surrounded by greenery, ancient and modern, in a field in the centre of the city stood a sculpture worthy of the Venice Biennale of those years. We were surprised to find a “Pelicova” Street, dedicated to Silvio Pellico. A dedication to a victim of political persecution from a foreign land? With an anti-imperialistic function in a Socialist era? Dictated by a shared condition of subjected peoples, the Moravian and Italian? In that gloomy castle enlivened by the presence of tourists, the memory of Pellico’s My Prisons was intact, vivid and whole, jealously preserved. Prague was a capital full of motion, but there was no mass tourism in the alleyways of the sorcerers and their alembics. In Vaclavzke Square, the Holy King towered over a group of parked cars that seemed to be attached to the foot of the statue. There weren’t any bronze-coloured robots in line which today take up the space of that great emptiness. It was the piazza that was to see itself crowded with thousands of Prague residents when they smiled as they hailed the Spring and when they wept at the arrival of the Russian tanks. They would see Jan Palack become a burning torch. But Prague was also the happiness of a completely Western wedding, with a bride in a short white dress coming out of the City Hall smiling for the traditional photographs.
The Greece of 1967 was still the Greece of study-trip tourists, teachers with university students following them, as was I. After Pireus, on the way to Athens the dark blue of the Mediterranean filtered through rows of green foliage dotted with orange, bitter oranges, which we called marange in our dialect. Even more suggestive was the winding of the seashore when the Judas trees were blossoming during that Greek spring. Vegetation we were still unfamiliar with.
In a Greece without tourists our academic guides arranged for us to be received by local government and cultural officials: we were bringing testimony of a Salentine land in which the griko language lives on to this day. After the classical treasures of Athens, we were fascinated by the silence of an enchanted landscape at Delphi, at Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, we gave life to the ghosts of heroes discovered in our books. From the theatre of Epidaurus to the columns of Olympia, ours was truly a study trip. We experienced our “transgressions” by discovering the odour and taste of souvlaki , the strong sweetness of ouzo, the gummy sweetness of loukoumie. And then some traditional shopping: textiles, bags woven by hand, small wooden objects. The stay in Athens ended with a transgression, permitted only for the older university students: a late evening walk in the moonlit Omonoia Square, in front of the euzones guarding Parliament.
We lived through the summer of 1968 within a European reality where not even the slightest echo was heard of upheaval and transformation, as we travelled East once again, in a land in which the cities resembled those in Italy, the Yugoslavia of then, the Croatia of today. We learned that it was now called Zadar, and no longer Zara, the city in which the Romans had already left many traces and where there was a church from the 1300s which was exactly like the Romanic of our own home, the Romanic of the cathedrals in Puglia. At least the Maraschino hadn’t changed its name and was still the “Maraschino di Zara”, Luxardo brand, in its lovely straw-covered bottle. The tourists were just local people on holiday and they looked at us Italians with a kind of benevolent curiosity. We met visitors of more varied origins as we went further South in two other small cities which symbolize Dalmatian culture, Spalato and Dubrovnik, We enjoyed the beauty of that Adriatic shore, still wild and little known, with an intensely blue sea, rich in fish to be eaten in the rustic coastal restaurants.
In Sebenico, a small town out of time, we discovered how much of Venice had remained in Dalmatian lands, with the semi-deserted little streets, with the window frames falling on the façades of many houses, with proud old women with a haughty expression on the threshold, erect, working at crotchet, in the dark clothes dictated by tradition, with a strange head covering.
In Diocletian’s palace at Spalato we found ourselves lost in a crowd of tourists, amid the ruins, columns, stone lions; it wasn’t easy to enter into the spirit of the places. We discovered the beauty of Dubrovnik: towards the sea with its picturesque indentations and towards the interior with the entanglement of Venetian calli with façades framed by double and triple mullions and bilobate and trilobate windows. About twenty-five years later everyone feared that that art and culture would disappear forever, perhaps it was only luck that that didn’t happen in those places, that the damage was restorable.
The Albania which to us Salentians seemed a few steps away was still forbidden to us. We knew little or nothing of that land, perhaps just the stories and memories of those who had visited it, in uniform, during the military campaign of WWII. As a little girl, I was struck by the story of a very tall King with the absurd name of Zog, and of a very young blue-eyed queen, Geraldine, leaving her land, thrown out by the Italian invasion while her baby was about to be born.
Then, referring to Albania, we learned to use the phrase, “China is near”.
The clear air coming over the mountains in the cold days of winter, gave us a glimpse of snowy woods and hilltops, clusters of homes, the coast; in summer dawns, of that land we saw only hazy outlines about which to fantasize.
Thus, it remained only a journey to be put off, entangled in our desires. Then, during the 1990s, it was the Albanians who surprised us, by the thousands, disembarking amidst the umbrellas of the Salento beaches and they were welcomed with a show of curious solidarity. But that’s another story.