Seferis’s line about his native Greece, ‘Our country is a closed in place, all mountains’, haunted my mind as I traversed Albania. I had gone in the hope that Albania now would be like the southern Europe of my student days. The news in brief is: it is, and it isn’t. First impressions of Tirana, the capital, were that it was a city in a hurry to expand. Despite being badly damaged in 1944, it retains an unexpected charm, perhaps because of Mussolini’s pine-lined boulevards and green spaces.…