Hi! 

Today I'd like to recommend you a book I've recently got. It's The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning by Ed Vulliamy, a British journalist and writer, who was New York correspondent for The Observer for six years and Rome correspondent from The Guardian. It's a reportage which tells about many aspects of today's situation in Bosnia: about its political condition, about how is the life of the survivors 20 years after the outbreak of the Bosnian War (the book was published in 2012), about the needness of justice and punishment for the war criminals who are, partially, still free, and about a problem which is nowadays omnipresent in any kind of historical debate: the collective memory.

The famous slogan: 'Remembering Srebrenica' has a particular meaning and importance for the author. Although he didn't take part in the Srebrenica investigation, he was one of the journalist who discovered the concentration camps in Omarska and Trnpolje and informed the world about them, which was one of the most important and, at the same time, shocking news after the Second World War. 

But does anybody of you know anything about Omarska? About the details of the Srebrenica massacre, which was actually the biggest genocide in Europe after the Holocaust? About the trial of Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić? If yes, you are in the tiny minority of the Europeans. This is also one of the aspects which Ed Vulliamy comments widely. It's unbelievable that Europe decided to leave unsaid the fact that in the very last years of the 20th century the areas of the Former Yugoslavia experienced such a huge cruelty, despite of the declarations of the leaders of the majority of the European countries who promised that the atrocities of the Second World War would never be back. 

Few days ago I wanted to recommend to one of my friends a documentary about the Srebrenica massacre which I'd watched a day before. He interrupted me after I'd told him what the film was about and asked me: 'Why are you watching this kind of films? What for? Come on, I don't want to know anything about it. How can you sleep calmly after watching it?'. OK, maybe I wouldn't recommend watching 'Shoah' by Claude Lanzmann to everybody (although I think it's the greatest film of our times). But I would rather ask how do you sleep calmly pretending that the Bosnian War never happened? 'Remembering Srebrenica' doesn't refer to the past. Neither to the present. It refers to the future - we have to remember that only two decades, only two-hours flight from Paris separate us from the biggest drama of the second half of the 20th century, which is still going on. We have to remember it so we won't let it happen again.

And one more thing. In the Polish preface to The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning Ed Vulliamy wonders why the Polish translation of the book is the first one in Europe, even though Polish people don't seem to be very interested in this part of history. 

Think about it. And then - read it. 

Hello from Italy!

Yesterday I finally arrived in a small town near to Bari, after spending two days in a (surprisingly economic!) car. If you've already started to hate me because of my geographic location, I can tell you that there's nothing to be jealous of - it's cold, it's raining and I have no time to do anything else apart from playing violin and studying. But during this 2000-km journey I had enough time to reflect about things that I'd like to share with you.

First of all, if you've ever had an opportunity to see a sunset in the Alps from a plane, you might think that there's nothing more beautiful in the world. That's what I thought when I saw it last year for the first time. But this year I decided to change perspective and see the Austrian and Italian part of this incredible mountain chain from below. And I'm not able to decide whether it's better or worse because it's totally different, but still, definitely breathtaking. It's impossible to catch it if you only have a poor LG smartphone camera, but still, isn't it just amazing?

Secondly, I had a great opportunity to actually experience some observations from one of  Marc Augé's texts, which some of you and I were lucky to comment with our professor on the master's degree seminary classes. Here's a fragment from his famous book 'Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity':

'France's well-designed autoroutes reveal landscapes of somewhat reminiscent of aerial views, different the ones seen by travelers on the old national and departmental main roads. They represent, as it were, a change from intimist cinema to the big sky of Westerns. But it is the texts planted along the wayside that tell us about the landscape and make its secret beauties explicit. Main roads no longer pass through towns, but lists of their notable features - and, indeed, a whole commentary - appear on big signboards nearby. In a sense the traveler is absolved of the need to stop or even look. Thus, drivers batting down the autorout du sud are urged to pay attention to a thirteenth-century fortified village, a renowned vine-yard, the 'eternal hill' of Vézelay, the landscapes of the Avallonnais and even those of Cézanne [...]. The landscape keeps its distance, but its natural or architectural details give rise to a text, sometimes supplemented by a schematic plan when it appears that the passing traveler is not really in a position to see the remarkable features drawn to his attention, and thus has to derive what pleasure he can form the mere knowledge of its proximity.

Motorway travel is thus doubly remarkable: it avoids, for functional reasons, all the principal places to which it takes us; and it makes comments on them'. 

It's a great observation, valid for the French, German, Austrian and Italian autoroutes. If you think about it this way, a 2000-km journey becomes a long and incredibly dynamic narration. 

That's all by now because the 'siesta' is already over and I have to dress up as an artist and try to win a violin competition. 

Have a nice afternoon!