The blue immensity of the Adriatic shimmers calmly, flickering in the midday light. We strain our gaze, trying to see if we can glimpse Albania, which is eighty kilometers away as the crow flies. We are in Ótranto, the easternmost tip of Italy. It will soon be forty years since I did the same exercise, but from the other side, on the Albanian coast of Vlorë: "There is Italy," the party leaders would tell us, with a desire for freedom and consumption in their eyes that they had to repress because they were the guardians of the last spiritual reserve of Marxism. It advances, consecutively. They couldn't go to Italy, but Italy would see them every day with the subtle invasion of RAI television frequencies, which was the way the Albanians on the coast saw the world through a hole and made their own (and painful) deductions.
Centuries before the airwaves crossed the Otranto Channel, the Turks had already passed through, and Greek words that are still preserved today in the dialects of Puglia. Even we, the Crown of Aragon, also watch over those shores from the formidable bastion that dominates the city. And long before that, Christianity passed through, giving Puglia a handful of late Romanesque churches that justify the trip, such as the Cathedral of Otranto itself, with a mosaic floor made up of 300,000 pieces, or Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which in Galatina, with Galatina, was the closest thing to a cinematic sensation for the illiterate public of the time. Puglia is an immense balcony overlooking history, art, and the human mix that has built the same corner of the world we share, barely two hours away by plane.
