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.