There are two teenagers at the Trieste train station, the boy dressed as a cowboy, the girl as a squaw. They are lovely and absurd on this cold, dark winter morning. They’re buying tickets to Venice. It’s Fat Tuesday, and Alice and Nicola, thirty-five years old between them, want their piece of Carnival.

Trieste constitutes an ideal point of departure for my journey across my country. It is proudly Italian (we fought World War I to get it back from Austria), but it also feels Slavic (Slovenia is a few miles away). It looks German (it used to be the main harbor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). It is Christian and it is Jewish. It faces the blue Adriatic sea, with the green Carso mountains at the back.  It’s the North of the South, the South of the North, the East of the West, and the West of the East.