Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (10 page)

I thought it very odd, when I was young, and encountered the Trieste mélange of loyalties. I was a simple British patriot in those days—even Wales was subsumed in my idea of a benevolent and majestic British nation-state, benign suzerain of an unexampled empire, headed by a monarch everyone respected, led at that time by a charismatic champion, victorious as ever and destined to live happily ever after. I was not in the least chauvinistic; in fact I was everyone’s patriot, as easily moved by “La Marseillaise” or even “Deutschland Über Alles” as I was by “God Save the King.” I assumed that my contemporaries’ patriotism was as liberal as my own, only becoming suspect when it descended into the obdurate banality of “My country right or wrong.” In short my views were probably much like those of most Britons of my age and kind, at the end of the second world war.

No wonder I was taken aback by the muddled fealties of Trieste! There were Italians here then who were still proud of their Fascist State, or who were altogether disillusioned by it. There were Communist Slovenes who boasted of their new People’s Federation, and royalist Croats who utterly disowned it, and separatists who thought in terms of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia or Herzegovina, entities I hardly knew existed. There were old ladies forever recalling the lost glories of
K u K
in Trieste, and sure that nothing could ever replace them. When I realized that all these contradictory loyalties were perfectly genuine—when I worked out the meaning of those names on the war memorial—I began to see the idea of the nation-state in a new light. I already knew Dr. Johnson’s saw, about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. Now I glimpsed the fateful nonsense of nationalism, for which so many of my generation, and my father’s too, had fought and died.

TEN
The Nonsense of Nationality

One warm day in 1946 I sat down on a bollard on the Molo Audace, close to the Piazza Unità, to write a maudlin essay. The Yanks, Brits and Jugs (as we called each other then) still disputed the city, and Trieste was of no decided country, no particular allegiance, no certain ideology. The successor to its Austrian Governors and Italian Prefects was an American general, and up on the Karst Tito’s commissars held sway. British and American military officers did the work of the imperial and Fascist bureaucrats. The Royal Navy provided a Port Captain. The Hotel de la Ville was the American officers’ club, the Albergo Savoia Excelsior was ours, and where the soldiers of the Austrian 18th Infantry Division had sauntered, or the plumed
bersaglieri
swaggered, there was I, sitting on the jetty writing an essay.

It was a piece about nostalgia, but nostalgia for a place and condition I had never known: Europe before the convulsions of the twentieth century had upset all its assumptions. I had never been to continental Europe before the war, so my nostalgia was all hearsay, but was none the less pungent for that. I pined for a Europe that seemed in my fancy to form a cohesive whole, sharing values and manners and aspirations, and when I looked around me at the Trieste of 1946, I thought I could see the ghost of that ideal. Except for its docks the city had not been greatly damaged, and its buildings still offered an epitome of Mitteleuropa—of Europe distilled, as it were. It seemed to embody the very mixture of races and languages, the civilized continuity of culture, that I imagined for my lost continent as a whole. Students and artists still frequented its coffee-houses. Bookshops abounded. Wine flowed. A Smareglia opera was being performed in the opera house that very season, just as one had been performed there (so a programme note told me) in 1885, 1886, 1895, 1899, 1900, 1908, 1910, 1921, 1926, 1928, 1929 and 1930. Ships came and went, as they came and went from Hamburg and Marseilles, Oslo and the Piraeus. Steam trains laboured along the waterfront, as I imagined them criss-crossing European landscapes from Scotland to the Alps. So I sat there on my bollard like a figure in an allegory, sucking my pen and cogitating, and thinking up poignant adjectives.

But I was deluded, of course, in my nostalgia. The Europe of my dreams had never existed, above all because of nationality. If race is a fraud, as I often think in Trieste, then nationality is a cruel pretence. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of this place shows, it is disposable. You can change your nationality by the stroke of a notary’s pen; you can enjoy two nationalities at the same time or find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. In one of his books Joseph Conrad (né Korzeniowski), knowing how artificial nationality was, likened it to “an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence.” It is not usually racial prejudice that incites hooligans to bash each other in football stadiums, but particularly unaccomplished convictions of nationhood. The false passion of the nation-state made my conceptual Europe no more than a chimera: and because of nationality the city around me that day, far from being a member of some mighty ideal whole, was debilitated in loneliness.

NATIONALISM flared in Trieste when, during the nineteenth century, most of Italy became united in the passionate progression of the Risorgimento, and the kingdom of Italy under King Vittore Emanuele II came into being. It was not only an Italian movement. The libertarian risings of the 1840s happened all over the Habsburg possessions—one of Musil’s characters called them “all this tuppeny-halfpenny liberty-mongering of the Czechs and the Poles and the Italians and the Germans.” But the Italians set the pace of it, and by the 1870s Trieste remained the one foreign-held city that Italian nationalists claimed as their own. The new Italian frontier was only a few miles from Trieste, and regions that had long been under the city’s jurisdiction were now in a foreign country. But was it foreign? More and more Italians of Trieste did not think so. They found themselves caught in Garibaldi’s spell, and a word entered the political vocabulary that was specifically related to their city:
irredentismo
, irredentism, the condition of being un-redeemed. For thousands of Triestini it became a battle-cry, and the complacent nature of Trieste changed.

Now the political police had their hands full, and the
lamparetti
were kept busy chasing slogan-scrawlers and statue-chippers. Secret societies were formed; explosives were stashed; many of the cafes, so comfortably reminiscent of Old Vienna, became hotbeds of Italian dissent. All came to a head in 1882 when an exhibition was held in the city to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Habsburg Trieste, and it was announced that the Emperor himself would be visiting it. A young Triestine named Guglielmo Oberdan (originally, as it happened, Oberdank), who had fled to Italy to avoid serving in the Austrian army, returned to Trieste with two bombs and a revolver in his suitcase, and his mind on assassination. The authorities were waiting for him. He was arrested, tried for treason and hanged in the Austrian barracks of the city, crying to the end “Viva Italia! Viva Trieste Libera!”

So the irredentists of Trieste gained a martyr, and they used him well. Their cause boomed. The Italians of the city became ever more estranged from the Austrians, and vice versa. Few young Italians would go near the Caffè Eden, the favourite resort of Austrian officials; not many Austrians would venture into the hotly irredentist Caffe San Marco. Isabel Burton wrote that an Austrian would hardly give his hand to an Italian at a dance, and no Italian would attend a concert when an Austrian was singing. If Austrians gave a party Italians threw a bomb into it, she said, and members of the imperial family were greeted with “a chorus of bombs, bombs on the railway, bombs in the garden, bombs in the sausages.” A
lodogno
tree outside the doors of the cathedral, survivor of an ancient cemetery there, was adopted as an ostentatiously sacred symbol of Italianness, and the imperial secret police became ubiquitous—even transient visitors with the slightest claim to nationalist sympathies found themselves under surveillance.

When the Austrians proposed to erect a statue of the Emperor in the Piazza Giovanni, Italian patriots forestalled them with a marble figure of Verdi, and everyone knew what that signified—Verdi was Trieste’s most popular composer not simply because of his associations with the city, but also because
Nabucco
was the symbolic opera of the Risorgimento, and because the letters of the composer’s name had become an acronym of irredentist loyalty, standing for
V
ittore
E
manuele
R
e
D
’
I
talia. On the birthday of the King of Italy almost every Italian in Trieste wore a flower in his button-hole; on the birthday of the Emperor the only flags that flew were on the Governor’s palace, the barracks and the prison. The day after the assassination of King Umberto of Italy, in 1900, patrolling
lamparetti
found the cherub Giovannini del Ponterosso dressed in full mourning. The only statue of the Emperor in the entire city was inside the main post office—the one precluded by Verdi in the Piazza Giovanni; sadly disillusioned by his Most Faithful City, Franz Joseph never went near the place during the last twenty years of his life.

Within Italy not everyone was much interested in Trieste: even the great Risorgimentist Giuseppe Mazzini had not claimed it for his State. In 1882 the Italian Kingdom itself, having got most of what it wanted from the Habsburg empire, seemed to abandon the city by concluding an alliance with Austria. But when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914 the Trieste
italianissimi
saw his killer as a reincarnation of Oberdan, and the consequent world war as a vehicle of redemption; and sure enough two years later the Italians switched alliances and declared war on Austria. In Trieste irredentism in all its aspects became treasonable, and what remained of the old civic equilibrium was shattered. The newspaper
Il Piccolo
, which represented all that was most Italian in the city, was summarily closed down. The Caffe San Marco was burnt out. The Verdi statue was destroyed. The sacred tree of San Giusto was dug up and replaced by one less full of meaning.

The Italians fought their war on battlefields that were often within earshot of Trieste, and under the peace treaty of Rapallo they were given their prize. The Risorgimento was completed; Trieste was redeemed. On November 3, 1918, when the Austrian administration was still functioning in the city, the destroyer
Audace
(1,017 tons) sailed in from Venice carrying a contingent of
bersaglieri
, the first troops of the Kingdom of Italy to set foot in Trieste. Watched by an exultant crowd the ship tied up at the Molo San Carlo, close to the Piazza Grande. The name of this pier commemorated both an eponymous Austrian warship that had sunk there long before, and the Austrian Emperor Charles VI who had first established the greatness of Trieste. The jubilant Italians immediately renamed it after the little warship of their success, and it has been the Molo Audace ever since.

O, THE ORGY of triumphalism that ensued, the re-naming of streets and bars and cafés, the adjustments of allusion, the revisions of loyalty! Riva Carciotti became Riva 3 Novembre. Molo Giuseppino became Molo Bersaglieri. Piazza Grande became Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia. The Caffè Flora became the Caffè Nazionale. The Porto Nuovo, which had become the Porto Vecchio, became the Porto Vittorio Emanuele III. The Verdi statue was replaced with a replica, made by its original sculptor from the metal of captured Austrian guns. From here, the City of Redemption, the vulgarly romantic adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio set off with his private army of filibusters, in cloaks, daggers and feathered hats, to seize Fiume for Italy too. And when the Fascists came to power in 1922 they cherished Trieste as a supreme national and even expansionist symbol. It was Roman. It was Italian. It was theirs by right of history and conquest, and the centuries of Habsburg rule had been no more than an interlude. Besides, as an official publication declared, “The Fascist Government is profoundly cognizant of the importance of Trieste for the economic and political expansion of Italy in the Central Danube hinterlands.”

IN FACT Trieste became just another provincial Italian city with an uncertain future, and it soon lost its old allure—James Joyce, who returned for a few months after the war, was soon disillusioned by it, and went away for good. But the Fascists adopted it as their own, and made it one of their show-places. Oberdan became, in retrospect, a Fascist as well as an irredentist hero, and his memory was carefully fostered. The Piazza Caserma was renamed Piazza Oberdan in his honour, and on the site of the barracks where he was executed a Museum of the Risorgimento was opened. It is still there, and inside it is reverently preserved the cell where Oberdan spent the last days of his life, as St. Francis’s woodland hut and Lincoln’s log cabin have been reconstructed by cultists of other kinds. In a sort of dark shrine nearby, on the exact spot of his death, a gaunt statue of the martyr is guarded by weeping angels with intersecting wings, rather as brides are attended with crossed swords at military weddings.

Mussolini’s men in Trieste were headed by a Prefect, installed in the palace of the Austrian Governors. Their first ideological purpose was to establish the ancient Italianness of the place, and remind everyone that it had been a Roman colony long before Austria had ever been heard of. Scholars quoted Dante to demonstrate that Istria, beyond Trieste, had always been the easternmost territory of Italy. Archaeologists restored the Roman amphitheatre that we glimpsed on our first day in town: in a 1930s picture of it that I have before me now a placard proclaims hugely from a nearby wall “ROMA DOMA”—which I take to signify “Rome Rules, OK?” They restored the Roman forum on the hill above, too, built a Via Capitolina up to to it and liked to recall that until the nineteenth century the hill had been popularly known as Monte Tiber. They erected a heroically Italian war memorial up there, all shields, naked torsos and fasces; they erected a catafalque commemorating the victorious Italian Third Army of the first world war, decorated with a machine-gun, a bomb, a shell, a howitzer and a dagger, together with a map marking the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum; they carefully preserved the
lodogno
tree by the cathedral door.

At the top of the Scala dei Giganti, the grandest of the city’s stone staircases, an immense column was erected, with a fountain playing around it, to provide the city centre with the kind of declamatory ensemble both Romans and Fascists loved. A university was opened, with a histrionic headquarters on the edge of town, and official structures of one sort and another went up opposite the amphitheatre. A start was made on a trunk road to link the centre of Trieste with the Italian national highway system. The upper part of the Canal Grande was filled in for the sake of traffic improvements. A handsome new Maritime Station, for long-haul passenger traffic, was built on the Molo Bersaglieri. The Duke of Aosta moved into Mira-mare, as commander of the local air forces, and refurnished his quarters in what was described as the Rationalist manner. And on the slopes of the northern bay, overlooking the whole city, there appeared in 1927 a monumental lighthouse. Fifty years before, this would have been supported by emblematic images of Virtue, Prosperity or even Profit: now an alarmingly androgynous figure of Victory crowned it, winged and helmeted, and to its base was affixed the anchor of the
Audace
.