In a gas station half-way between Venice and Trieste I bought a map of my new world. It is a part of a series covering all regions in Italy in the 1:250,000 scale. The region is Friuli - Venezia Giulia, but the map covers a good chunk of Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia, as well. Of the major cities, one can find in it Venice, Padova, Ferrara, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Udine, and Trieste in Italy; Lienz, Villach, and Klagenfurt in Austria; Ljubljana, Kranj, and Koper in Slovenia; and Rijeka, Pazin, and Pula in Croatia. The entire Istrian peninsula and all the Istrian islands—Krk, Cres, and Rab—are on the map. The Alps, including the Julian Alps and a part of the Dolomites, are there, too. In short, the map embraces so much more than one would guess from its title. And that is its main virtue, to be sure. By the standards of the region, the map is almost ecumenical. By my own standards, it is all-embracing, indeed. My new world is in it entire. Which is why I love to spread the map on the floor and stare at it for a long, long time, as though I could somehow soak it in once and for all.

Addendum (November 17, 2015)

And I love to spread the map on the floor and stare at it for a long, long time to this very day. Which I do every few months without fail. But I do my best to keep it in perfect shape, for I cannot imagine that I would ever be able to find an adequate replacement for it. For me, it remains the one and only map of my new world. Nearly thirteen years later, though, I realize that I have done very little to explore it on the ground. When I bought my house in Motovun, I thought that many buses and boats would be at my disposal whenever I wished to travel in the region either by land or sea, but that turned out not to be the case. Nowadays, people in these parts travel by car, as well. For better or worse, my beloved is not fond of driving, either. And so the map must be hopelessly out of date in terms of highways in the region, and especially in Croatia and Slovenia, where many new ones have been built over the recent years. Be that as it may, the map of Friuli – Venezia Giulia is always close at hand. And I love travelling across it in my own mind. Many a place on the map comes alive as soon as I read its name.