I feel like Scipio Slataper, with his book Il mio Carso, whose first three sentences begin “I should like to tell you.” “I should like to tell you I was born on the Carso” - the Carso is the fascinating rocky slavic territory surrounding Trieste - I should like to tell you I was born in Moravia, I should like to tell you I was born in Croatia ... naturally, it isn't true, he was born in Trieste, but he is expressing his desire to speak to the others, to the Italians; but he, too, is an Italian; shortly after this he will die in the war, for the cause of the Italianity of Trieste. Slataper gives one the feeling that in order to speak of his own condition, of being Italian but not absolutely, similar to but not identical with his compatriots, he must do what the Greeks said poets do - i.e. lie. But lies, that is, certain metaphors, are often the only way to tell certain truths, to try to say what one is, and what is one's real destiny. Each one of us finds himself in that splendid parable of Borges' about a painter who paints landscapes, seas, rivers, trees only to realise in the end that he has painted his own self-portrait, because his identity is precisely his own way of seeing things.