One year ago BerlinRomExpress was born, on a hot Roman evening. Time goes by, many events have unfold since then. The Crisis. The total disappearance of the Palast der Republik in Berlin and the appearance of a big green meadow. The Macro opening postponement in Rome. And so on.

We took this picture 2 years ago, during our holiday in Berlin in August 2007. Would it be crazy, we thought, to consider Berlin like our home away from home?

Sometimes frustrated by Mediterrenean or Tuscany-shire weekends, especially when morphing into a traffic-intensive copy of city life because of the “getting there and back from there”, we sniffed in Berlin under the über-urban note a countryside-in-town soul…so we bought a flat in Berlin, and lived happily ever after in a schizophrenic mix of 11/12 of Rome and 1/12 of Berlin.

Two years ago, the idea. One year ago, the start of this blog (and its little sister, Aflatinberlin) and of a sort of commuting life.

Negative aspects:

-  We did produce some CO2 via easyjet.

- On the other hand, since we gave up on our car, use public transport in Rome or bike (in Berlin), we’ve reduced our carbon footprint on a pan-european basis.

Hence: we’re strong supporters of the creation of a true BerlinRomExpress railway service! There’s too little rail in Europe…

Positive aspects:

- We see more and more reality from 2 different viewing points. The media help but actually living a few days per month in another city is something different. It’s not new for us. In the past we have lived and worked abroad. But we did not know each other and each of us had one “home” at a time. Be it Darmstadt, Paris, Copenhagen, London. Now it’s like having two homes. Schizophrenic but interesting.

- We are tax payers also in another country and can tell the difference. Well, just the local tax, the Grundsteuer. But it’s something that makes us feel citizens of Berlin and not tourists. We pay for a service we get. That’s such a nice feeling, compared with Italy, where we pay (and others don’t) for some services (and for no services sometimes).

- And this is very personal, the “border feeling”. Being from Triest, I grew up with a frontier in front of my window, and I feel at home in Berlin. In Rome, but also in London or Paris, you get the feeling of living in a capital. Berlin is a border-line capital. Capitals are so sure about themselves. So lavish and bulimic. Egocentric and central. Berlin is always a bit of a pale anxious punk, with some bad scars. In the same way as Triest is a tanned skinny girl who stutters when she’s nervous. These cities had to grow up fast, without a big help from the parents.

- Berlin is in continuous transition, and this is a feeling that as a Roman citizen I really crave.

This window on the oscillation between Rome and Berlin and its sister, AflatinBerlin, meant that a few winter evenings were spent on the Mac, blogging. Ugh…not very social, I must admit. But one year later, if I have to trace back the starting point of new friendships, in Berlin and in Rome, of e-mail correspondances with fellow bloggers and of interesting Skype conversations across the oceans, well somehow they all started with this blog…social networks are indeed social in the end…!