This article reflects on the relationship between infrastructure and different mobility regimes in contemporary Europe, focusing particularly on Trieste’s borderscape. Although several studies in the last decade have adopted an infrastructural approach to analyse different mobility regimes, the relationships between them remains to be fully explored. Taking into account the colonial origin of the infrastructural logic, this article introduces the concept of the “nocturnal body” of the infrastructure, illustrating how such logic has always implied the imposition of differential forms of mobility. While infrastructures ensure safe and fast mobility for certain social groups in specific spaces, at the same time other groups are forced to move through its nocturnal body. This “body” represents a social and political space characterised by violence and high risk, but also the material precondition for the very
existence of the safer, more visible workings of the infrastructure.