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Beyond the Wall: Adventures of a Volkswagen Beetle on the Other Side of the Iron Curtain (in English)
Marco Carnovale
Synopsis "Beyond the Wall: Adventures of a Volkswagen Beetle on the Other Side of the Iron Curtain (in English)"
1980: the Cold War between capitalist West and socialist East is in full swing. Tensions are high but, at the academic level, some channels of useful exchange remain open. The author and two classmates would join one such program linking a leading American university and its counterpart in Poland.They travel to Warsaw here by car and, in addition to attending classes, travel far and wide within the country as well as to several of the neighbors in the socialist bloc where the Soviet Union called all the shots. They drive across the USSR and visit the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the division of Europe. Throughout, Marco took detailed notes of what they saw and heard.Almost four decades later, the East-West division of Europe is gone. Marco recently found his diary and decided to publish an expanded version of it. His written notes from 1980 have been enriched with descriptions and analyses of historical events that will help the reader see his personal experience in a more significant cultural, social, political and economic context.The author hopes this real life story will help younger generations, who did not live through the Cold War, better appreciate the blessing of living in a European continent that is immensely more open, rich and free than it was then.Marco was born in Rome in 1959. He started traveling as a teenager with an Interrail trip to Scandinavia and never stopped since. He moved to the United States at eighteen and graduated cum laude in international relations at Georgetown University. During that time he also spent a semester in Poland and was arrested for accidentally trespassing into a Warsaw Pact military base. He then earned a Ph.D. in strategic studies at M.I.T. in 1989, just when the end of the Cold War forced him to study everything all over again. He has lectured worldwide and published books and essays on international politics. He also contributed to the Italian Encyclopaedia Treccani. In Brussels he worked for many years at NATO, where he defended the Western way of life from all kinds of security threats and challenges.He learned to take photos with manual cameras and Kodachrome film. Over time he became a SCUBA diver and a pilot of gliders and one fine day he decided to take his camera underwater. As he grew up he began to appreciate good wines – 1959 was a great vintage! He has fun in the kitchen and loves listening to Beethoven and cool jazz. Later he went on to travel almost full time. He met his wife in the Maldives and they now live in London, where he has become a sommelier, writing about wines as well as travels.
