Sarajevo's feelings

There are some places you think you’d never visit: that place, for me, was Bosnia. 
Not because I had some kind of prejudice, but because I never though about it. Then, life brought me in Croazia, a wonderful yet remote place, where the only alternative to a one-hour drive was a five-hour bus ride. In hindsight, I would’ve just taken my car from Sardinia, that way I would’ve been wandering around nonstop! 

I knew nothing about those places. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I can say one of the main reasons I love travels is that you learn so much by wandering around: first you learn about geography, then about the history. And if your destination is Sarajevo, its history is so sad that a sleepless night watching old documentaries about war on YouTube is really not enough.

Believe me, this city is sad as well as romantic: the buildings by the river Miljacka are fully colored, and the promenade along the river guides you from the Fine Arts Academy building westwards to the Library in the east part of the city, through enchanting and melancholic alleys.
As soon as I reached the city center, I immediately thought of my mother: I thought that, while in that place many ethnic groups were escaping from war, and few meters away from the place I was standing a bomb was probably destroying a building, she was pregnant with me. And she was probably lying on the sofa, gently caressing her belly, watching the news and finding out about that place torn to pieces by war.

And even if you want to happily enjoy your burek walking through the city, headstones follow you everywhere: the most touching thing I saw in my whole life was a house, just out of Sarajevo, with about twenty headstones in the front yard.
I asked myself a few times how they could live with that on their conscience: how can people my age, leaving the bar with their bodies full of beer, walk in front of so much pain? I would’ve asked to the forty-something people, that were my age then, what was it like for them. But I had no chance to meet them: they only survived because they escaped.. To never come back. Climbing on the Yellow fortress, beyond the Baščaršija district you can admire a beautiful view. Now that I’m looking at the pictures I see that from every three-sixty all-round perspective, I caught, along with colored buildings and trees made yellow from the autumn breeze, so many little headstones.