Budapest by www.born2travel.it

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11 September 2001

A date that no one will ever forget again. A day on which something changed profoundly all over the world. A tragedy worthy of the most thrilling sci-fi blockbuster with one single detail: it was all real. One day you wake up and realise that gratuitous cruelty, evil, still exists in the twenty-first century. We thought that after the Nazi concentration camps we had hit rock bottom. Times change and with them the mentality of men. But that's not quite how it is, at least it hasn't been since this day. Today the bottom has been "broken through". I, with dear Nino, was travelling from Bologna to Budapest when we begin to receive the first fragmentary news about a plane that had crashed in New York. Oh well, these things happen, even if right in the centre it's a bit strange. Our journey continues... Another one falls in the same place. It can't be a coincidence. Another one again.

We start to worry. The news piles up and confuses us, throwing us into a strange panic. But what is happening? At 08.47 on Tuesday 11 September 2001 America was experiencing a morning like any other. A minute later hatred struck with all its ferocity on New York, on America and on the world. The towers hit erupted smoke and flames, people's eyes amazement and disbelief. When the towers collapsed, the whole world was already in front of the television watching in astonishment those smoking ruins, which buried forever hundreds of people and dreams. They buried forever the certainties of millions of people. They buried forever the world we had known until then. Who had unleashed that hell? And why? Names and faces of the guilty were ready quickly, too quickly.

Was it possible that an intelligence apparatus so efficient as to identify the culprits of the disaster within a few hours had been so negligent as not to be able to prevent it? A thousand doubts, a thousand questions crowded, in those days, the minds of the Peoples of the Earth, but the eyes could see only and always the images of those people falling from the burning skyscrapers. Arriving in Budapest, all the world's televisions were broadcasting those images of terror without interruption. You could see those heartbreaking scenes commented on in all the languages of the world and we, mute, beyond the plastic box, wondered whether it was all true. Whether it was just a bad dream or whether man had really gone mad. But how far?

12 September 2001 Budapest (HUNGARY)

I spend the day of my twenty-second birthday with Nino and some Hungarian friends, still shaken by the various reports coming from the United States. Something has changed.

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