our progresses Usually we have the idea that our societies, in a certain way, are better then the past. Of course there are a lot of reasons that allow us to think this way: mainly when we consider the progresses in medicine and in scientific knowledge. We surely know more about the world that surrounds us (even though surely Sophocles and Aeschylus had a wider and deeper understanding of human psyche). But still there is something which escapes from this view. Some months ago I was reading an auto-biography of Stefan Zwaig and, among the wonderful pages of his book, a detail strikes me. Before WWI a man could travel among countries and continents without visas, passports, even without documents. He told that the first time he went to Us, he had no document at all! I think that this tells us a lot about how strongly the issues of security and controll have changed, and how now we consider normal something that more then a century ago would have been considered an unbearable offence to human freedom and personal dignity.