This is not just in Portugal

The sky is overcast and the temperature has dropped a bit. I use my rusty Italian to gauge the weather and whether I need to buy a coat. In no time, after realizing I'm Portuguese, the taxi driver starts talking about how prices have risen and wages have stagnated over the past 30 years in Italy. Florence, she tells me, is too expensive; it's not like the Lisbon she visited about ten years ago. I tell her that Lisbon isn't the same either. Tourism, of course. In Florence as in Lisbon. "Industries here have almost disappeared," she laments. Her granddaughter, who is leaving for a week's vacation with friends in Portugal, will have a hard time buying a house, despite being in university.

I have the house of an acquaintance of a friend waiting for me. It's right across from the Medici Palace, with tall, wide windows that look out over the Ponte Vecchio and wake me in the morning to the cathedral bells. The house, an apartment in a stone building that was once a convent, belonged to his grandmother. Now, Frederico rents it out to tourists, and with it, he has a comfortable life, which allows him to get through the winters when he can't take the hot air balloon tours that are his summer job.

At the doorstep, where one of those old taverns once stood, where wine was sold through a hole in the wall, stands an ice cream parlor, where groups of rosy-cheeked Americans gather, seeking the freshness of the water diffusers that spray the entrance. Everywhere you can hear the tapping of suitcase wheels rolling on the cobblestones, along with the explanations of tour guides and the chants of Catholic excursions, a Babel-like mix of strange sounds and broken English. The setting, made up of centuries-old stone buildings, is quite different from Lisbon, but the characters are not. In Portugal, as in Italy, locals are reduced to the role of innkeepers, in a more or less gentrified version.

The city center becomes uninhabitable. A café con leche costs €4.50, a croissant €6. Sitting at any terrace or restaurant requires a fee, which ranges from €1.50 to €2 per person.

All around, the Tuscan countryside is dotted with large estates, where wine and olive oil are primarily produced. Other crops, such as almonds and cherries, are almost non-existent. It wouldn't be profitable. There's no one to work the land. One winemaker complains about how difficult it is to work with Pakistanis who arrive without knowing how to care for the vines. "You have to explain it over and over again." But there's no one else willing to work there, much less for what the farmers are willing to pay.

The large estates have almost all been in the same family for hundreds of years. Aside from the lands belonging to the Church that were plundered by the French during the Napoleonic invasions or the wealthy foreigners who arrived from the 1970s onward, the large estates have rarely changed hands. The Antinori family settled there 600 years ago and is a prime example of this: for 26 generations, they have been producing wines in the Chianti region, both with grapes from their own estate and with those they purchase from local producers.

Alberto's father is almost 70 years old and has spent his entire life growing grapes for the Antinori family's wines. But the vineyard he's tended for decades isn't his. It belongs to a wealthy American who shows up once or twice a year. Alberto doesn't even know how to explain what he does. "He has investments, factories. About 25,000 people work for him around the world. He owns almost a quarter of the island of Santo Domingo," he tells me as we sip wine in a restaurant in the countryside where the Queen of the Netherlands visits every year. Alberto is used to running into these people. "One day, I walked in there," he says, pointing to a stone house, "and there were a bunch of famous people there, including Zuckerberg. Tutti stronzi." All idiots, or idiots, depending on the translations.

Just as for hundreds of years only a few managed to own land in Tuscany, now younger people find it difficult to buy a house. The property problem is becoming more complicated. In Italy, as here, there's an exodus of qualified young people, heading north with degrees paid for with taxes from the south, thus further unbalancing the balance of power.

A friend who lives there tells me he recently read a column in an Italian newspaper in which the father recounted how his daughter, having just arrived in London to study, was surprised when the owner of the restaurant where she was working offered her a contract after two or three days of trial. "Here, almost everything is paid in cash." Many have two or three jobs, but few or no deductions.

Europe is divided between a prosperous north, still with some possibilities for social advancement and social rights, and a south that serves as a playground for the wealthy and provides them with the workers they need. But one only needs to take a few steps back to see that the scale starts lower. There's always someone further south than us, someone poorer who dreams of the north. It's all a matter of perspective. Those at the top fearing those at the bottom, those at the bottom wanting to rise, on a scale that extends across the globe.

And, above all, a handful of people who don't need a compass, nor borders to define them. Those who buy estates in Tuscany or Santo Domingo and travel in private jets, knowing the world fits in their pockets. Alberto has seen this for decades. "If I have a house, if I have a handful of land, I'm a problem. I close the gate and send them on their way; I'm not interested in their rules. And that's why young people won't have a home, nor rights, because then they won't be able to complain and will have to submit," he concludes.

Susana, an Italian agricultural engineer who once taught in Denmark, also sees a policy designed to create people who don't oppose oppression, who don't demand their rights. "There's no investment in education. We have a huge teacher shortage in Italy, and schools are getting worse and worse. People without education become alienated, detached from political reality," she complains, explaining to me and a Swedish woman that, since Meloni came to power, abortion rights have begun to be questioned. "Now, there's even talk of reversing the right to divorce. I don't think it's going to happen. But the truth is, before, it wasn't discussed, and now it is."

Whenever I travel, a poem by Fernando Pessoa comes to mind: "Travel! Lose countries!" The verses are about the eagerness of those who long to be free from constraints and borders. But when I think of them, I think above all about how, with each journey, we gain the ability to understand that the world is, after all, much more equal than it appears on the surface. And that our singularities may actually be less bizarre and singular than they appear to us here. No, friends, this isn't just in Portugal.