Daniele Somenzi's Macedonia

Macedonia

Macedonia, besides being a nice fruit salad, is a brand-new state, part of Yugoslavia until recently; it borders Greece to the south and Serbia to the north, while Bulgaria touches it to the east and Albania to the west.

On the way there, driving towards Greece, I passed through Macedonia on the main road, the equivalent of our Via Aurelia. On the way back, the cold is intense and Nadia and I decide to stop in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, where we find a small guesthouse; the worry is that the car won't start in the morning because of the cold.

We sleep on the third floor and the next morning, as expected, a night frost and a temperature of minus 5 mean the car starts a second before the battery goes dead. All the frost on the windscreen then melted with the heat of the warm air produced by the engine which, after 10 minutes idling, both recharged the battery and warmed the interior of the cabin. I see that Macedonia is nothing modern; those who live there live badly, like in our post-war years. Here the Macedonian dinar is the currency, for about 2 million inhabitants, mostly mountainous.

We set off again towards Italy.

Bye