In 1977 an incident occurred in a tiny fisherman village located in the south-eastern corner of Italy, which resonated in both Washington and Moscow. That kind of linkages in history, combining the micro and macro levels of analysis simultaneously, is what inspires me the most as a historian and what makes me feel so much at home at EUR’s history department. An overarching, comprehensive view of history, one that intertwines the local and global together, helps me in the exploration of the global repercussions that a plethora of apparently marginal events recurrently had throughout the cold war.