Heavy goods, autobahns and no borders: Europe is always on the move – for now | Olivier Guez

Born next to a frontier, I criss-cross the continent all the time. Our borderless network is a privilege we can't take for granted

I'm a French writer based nominally in Italy, but Europe is my homeland. My mobile-phone provider makes me pay dearly for this fact. In any given year, I spend nearly nine months on the road, travelling the length and breadth of the continent: doing research, speaking at conferences, or just because I want to. Contrary to the spirit of the age, my life is mobile and cosmopolitan.

In 2023, I visited 18 European countries; five more than I did the year before. I'm a European citizen of no fixed abode, a hybrid supranational nomad, a kind of Homo europaeus, as Friedrich Nietzsche imagined in Human, All Too Human. Like Charles Baudelaire's flaneur, I take great pleasure in choosing a life of change, escape and endless movement across the European continent.