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I had come to see the old workers’ village of Panzano, in Monfalcone, the place where my great-grandparents worked a little over a hundred years ago. Seeing the houses, the lighthouse at the shipyard's entrance, and the streams of bicycles ridden  by workers with exotic tongues whirring around me, a strange sense of temporal confusion washed over me. I quickly realized that the old workers’ village of Panzano is one of those very particular places where time coils upon itself, the ringing of bells and the clicking of spokes being the active ingredients of a time loop that has lasted for a century.

Here, time seems to have stood still, even as those around me say the city has changed since the migratory waves of recent years. I caught the scent of anxiety and bitterness in their words, yet upon my arrival in the municipality, I felt that vibration typical of cities simmering with a blend of different cultures.

I cannot quite explain these contrasts, but glancing back at the past, I feel the city of Monfalcone and its old workers’ village of Panzano are the source of a zone of manifold migrations, a place where physical, temporal, and mental borders continually overlap and blur.