England Slovakia Quotes

Copies of Ficino’s translations were owned by Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Racine in France, by Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands, and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in Germany.56 The Ripoli Press’s 1484 edition is recorded at Harvard in 1735, at Yale in 1742, and even, by 1623, in China.57 More than 120 copies have survived into the twenty-first century: thirty-six in Italy, the remainder scattered from Malta, Slovakia, and Sweden to libraries in California, Kansas, Oregon, and the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.

There’s something about border towns that tastes like spilt liquor and cigarette ash. They rarely greet you with a smile. More like a shrug, a raised eyebrow, maybe a tax. And crossing from Slovakia into Hungary felt exactly like that: like the end of a party we were never really invited to. Gone were the manicured roads and apologetic drivers of the West. In their place: cracked tarmac, sun-faded billboards, and a lingering Cold War hangover you couldn’t quite shake off. It was perfect.