“Wait until you find out how everyone in my family has come from a different country,” says Alex Zigante on a recent summer afternoon.
Mr. Zigante, a 30-year-old engineer, takes a breath and lays out the family tree: His great-grandmother, Angela, was born in Austria-Hungary. His grandmother, Maria, 90, in Italy. His father, Aldo, 61, in Yugoslavia. And Alex was born and raised in Slovenia.
And yet, all of them have lived their lives here in Portorož, a seaside village in what is now southwestern Slovenia, where the family’s roots go back centuries to the Venetian Empire, and where their modest three-story home has been a fixed point on an ever-changing map.
How has one family managed to live in four different countries while remaining in the same house generation after generation?
“The world was changing even when our home was still,” Alex said.
Here on the western shores of the Istrian Peninsula, where the Adriatic Sea divides Italy from Central Europe, a century’s worth of wars and revolutions has left behind a community for whom national identity is often a mere matter of politics.
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