Just pass the checks at Tirana airport to understand how quickly everything has changed. Those who remember children with stuffed balls, olive green uniforms and bunkers of a country hungry for Hoxa's paranoia must keep up to date.
Albania is a construction site. A shabby hole of increasing size, around which the interests and the interested parties increase every day.
In the streets they multiply obsessively i lavazhe and gomisteri, an indication that the roads are horrendous but that in addition to potholes and donkeys there are more and more cars. In a country that has recently discovered the highway code, the wrong signs of places not used to cars are still visible. Yet the highway between Tirana and Vlora, between giant petrol stations and sudden holes, is brand new. The SUVs run there new rich that sew the fabric of the new nation more than the principles on which it is based.
Albania is a motor running after decades of rust: the desire to run and structural delays are the blades of a propeller that creaks but runs fast. Construction sites are everywhere. Between urbanistic horrors and environmental follies the dollars and the euro outclass the lekë, good card to identify a sovereignty for sale.
Today's Albania is the new by definition, the obsession of wealth by force and possibilities as an acquired right. Those who risked deportation only for having danced or prayed at the time of the communist criminocracy today find themselves crushed between the turbofolkers at full volume and the western melodies coming from the Otranto canal. The legendary Radio Tirana dear to Battiato today shoots pop melodies, Balkan imitations of our light music.
Walking around Albania brings joy. The visceral admiration that the Albanians have for Italy, the immense purchasing power and the sense of "all legitimate" that reigns everywhere give a sense of almost absolute strength. Albania is the Land of Toys, one meter from home, passed in less than twenty years from the pathological Stalinism of the Enver Hoxa regime to the hectic market, where the first smart ones who arrived made bingo. 
There is a reason. Albania is a more strategic country than one might imagine. Wedged between the rubble of Greece and the shattered Slavs further north, it is an island unto itself: opposite to the West, which came out of the Warsaw Pact in the 60s but at the same time an enemy of Titine communism, it has remained isolated from the world alienated from an ethnic uniqueness that not even North Korea's obsessions could aspire to.
Albania is small but a bomb ready to explode. It is the only country in Europe that boasts its own minorities beyond the borders of all the states that surround it: 2 million Albanians in Kosovo, half a million in Greece, 600.000 in Macedonia, tens of thousands in Montenegro. The Great Albania project on which the USA has been blown for a decade has been built right on this.
It was a moment. Changed the world in the 1991, who understood it has been busy, also because to do there was a lot, practically everything: to the collapse of the regime there were in all 300 km of railways (diesel and with different gauge of the rest of Europe) is a single international airport for an entire nation. Although the land of eagles was a collection of rugged mountains, the entire "road" network did not even boast a tunnel.
From the abyss to the surface the jump was quick. After the upheavals following the collapse of the institutions and the diaspora of a captive people for decades, at the end of the years 90 Tirana returned to the surface, recording "Asian" growth rates. Al 2016 is the only country on the continent to forecast a + 4% forecast on GDP and a concomitant decrease in unemployment.
But it is with the apparent bending of the numbers that the enormous steps forward must be read: the GDP growth rate between the 1999 and the 2013 has gone from 8% to 0,7%. Starting with the 2008, the decrease in growth was even more decisive. Albania in crisis then? Quite the contrary. The country after a decade of structural development has hooked itself to the trend of the global economy following its flows. From a "different" country it has turned into a "growing country" linked to the sinusoid of the markets, in the face of those like Italy, meanwhile it has remained to watch.
Who is behind these numbers?
The Bank of Albania was taken in hand by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, sealing Washington's supervision of national development. The American eye watches over every sector: after centuries of indifference the New York Times in the 2014 has included Albania among the first 5 most recommended tourist destinations in the world. Any interest? Today, tourism represents more than 10% of GDP, with repercussions on us that face off in the coming years we will be dealing with an increasingly motivated and competitive competitor. With less than 10 € in Saranda (ex Porto Edda) we eat the same fish of Salento with a sea with potential to be exploited.
Albania, light years away from the clichés of the first 90 landings in Puglia, appeals to many. Economics and geopolitics go hand in hand. From the scenes of the Balkans stage, the country found itself at the center of major regional issues. The Kosovo war of the 1999 has passed from the palaces of Tirana, one step away from that Rruga George W. Bush artery of the capital that says a lot.
When Durazzo will be connected to Pristina with European Corridor n. 8, we will understand better what we have in front of us and what we have missed.
Because this is about: a missed opportunity. 3 Albanians on 4 speak Italian; fashion costumes and trends depend on the Italian repeaters that if they don't make Albania the 21a region of Italy we are close. Just stroll around Blloku, the aperitif area in Tirana, to understand that the memory of Italians here is anything but negative.
Investing in Albania means paying the 10% of Irpef or owning the 100% of a company without having citizenship. From a cultural, economic and historical point of view we all had the cards to be the elder brothers of Tirana. Now the States are making us base camp ...
Even under the military profile, the music does not change. In the 2009, the former Stalinist Albania joined NATO. The FARSH (Albanian Armed Forces) returned to the 2002 in the US Department of Defense's development and modernization program, joining international missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and even Chad and Georgia. Although the American program provides for an increase in professionalism and a reduction in numbers, today Albanians in arms, about 30.000% of the population, are a little less than 1, a Prussian percentage.
The big US brother was joined by the Turkish "cousin". Membership of the Alliance, which was already envisaged in Berisha's times, was possible thanks to the leveling up of military standards carried out with the generous intervention of Turkey.
Tirana and Ankara arm in arm?
Turkey and Albania have a controversial but strongly intertwined history. What do you mean today, it's all to discover.
(photo: author /FARSH)
