The border drawn on paper, the broken squares, but also the small stories of everyday life.

Perhaps only through anecdotes can we today evoke the mixture of sadness and disbelief that must have gripped the inhabitants of these lands in the aftermath of that sudden wall, as in Berlin.

It was August 13, 1950, the Holy Year. After three years of darkness, it was decided that, for one day, the border could reopen. Thousands of people poured into Gorizia, forcing the rather rudimentary Casa Rossa crossing. Several chevaux de frise, strung with skeins of thread, stood in place of the current crossing building, a well-known trattoria, named Casa Rossa for its exterior color and famous for its talking parrot attraction. It was a spontaneous and peaceful invasion, forcing the controlled passage that had initially been granted. It was Sunday, but the Italians opened their shops. The city came to life; people had no money and traded eggs and butter for those beautiful sorghum brooms, impossible to find across the border. As darkness fell, the carts continued on their way home, and families held their brooms high as if they were precious trophies.

Darko Bratina, an intellectual and senator in the Italian Parliament, who passed away in 1997, wrote: “Toward evening, as the sun set, we returned to the city center, observing long lines of people making their way back in an orderly fashion toward Casa Rossa. Every now and then, brooms, carefully held on their shoulders, would emerge from the lines. All without the slightest incident. An exceptional image. An unforgettable Sunday that went down in the news and was recorded in the collective memory as the Sunday of the brooms. For at least one day, the border was “swept,” and the brooms left a special, symbolic mark on it. I then definitively understood the tragedy of borders, and from then on I began to dream of the erasure of this border of ours, also because, a few years earlier, in my earliest childhood, I had never seen one.”