Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It’s alluring, but complicated. – Beppe Severgnini
It is an early July morning in Berlin and I trundle my suitcase through the German capital’s cavernous, glass-and-steel main station. Outside the sun glints off the Reichstag and the Chancellery. Newspapers on the stands tell of wrangles over the EU’s recovery fund, a taboo-breaking proposal brokered by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron under which the union will issue common debt to help the continent’s poorer south through the coming economic slump. I put on my mask and board my train. It pulls out of the uppermost of the station’s five storeys of platforms, sweeping westwards through the once-divided city before speeding up across Brandenburg’s flat landscape of forests and farmland.
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