Right on the heels of our post Five Legs in Six Weeks trip overview, the New York Times slyly attempted to one-up our juggernaut media platform with this “One House in Four Countries” article:
Clearly a knockoff of WolfeStreetTravel and a blatant brand encroachment violation, but we’ll let it pass because the situation described in the article is very cool, and certainly aligns with our interest in European history and cartography. The gist (and hook) of the article is pretty much captured in the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article:
“ ‘Wait until you find out how everyone in my family has come from a different country,’ says Alex Zigante on a recent summer afternoon.
Mr. Zigante, a 30-year-old engineer, takes a breath and lays out the family tree: His great-grandmother, Angela, was born in Austria-Hungary. His grandmother, Maria, 90, in Italy. His father, Aldo, 61, in Yugoslavia. And Alex was born and raised in Slovenia.
And yet, all of them have lived their lives here in Portorož, a seaside village in what is now southwestern Slovenia, where the family’s roots go back centuries to the Venetian Empire, and where their modest three-story home has been a fixed point on an ever-changing map.”
Even better (for WolfeStreetTravel’s interests, anyway) is the series of maps included with the article, depicting the fluid and ever-evolving geopolitical construct that swirled around Portorož over a 100-year period:
Super freakin’ cool, from our perspective, to have your property caught up in the maelstrom of pre- and post-world war political territory restructuring; then revolution; then restructuring. Absolutely enthralling.
And who doesn’t want the occasional reminder of the scope and size of the extinct but still-mildly intriguing Austro-Hungarian Empire?
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