Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (16 page)

IN THE evening the shoppers boarded their dingy buses for the journey home. Every cranny, locker and cupboard was stuffed with acquisitions—packages dangled from roofs, boxes were stuck under seats, carrier bags were piled in the aisles and every child played with a bleeping space man. From the windows satisfied exhausted faces peered out through the cigarette smoke. I once buttonholed an elderly Hungarian, carefully writing a picture postcard as he waited to board his bus, and asked him how he had enjoyed his trip to Trieste. He said it was an experience of nostalgia—by which I prefer to think he meant, if only in folk-memory as it were, that it had been like an outing in the old times, when the zithers played on the lurching wagons and the peasant girls danced in their embroidered aprons.

But these encounters would soon be nostalgic for Trieste too. Before long people could buy their electric kettles, T-shirts and remote-controlled computer games just as well in Sofia, Bucharest or Bratislava, and the emporium fizzled out again. The Balkan bazaar was no more, the garden opposite the railway station was re-developed, and all that remained was a respectable covered market like any other. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century nothing came to much in Trieste. One after the other, regimes and ideologies and changing circumstances had all failed to restore its old virility. It was as though that redundant specialist of mine, during a very, very long retirement, were now and then to try starting some new activity altogether, growing mushrooms or playing the stock exchange, only to find that his cellar was too warm for fungi, and the Dow Jones had collapsed around him.

FIFTEEN
After My Time

Anthropomorphising cities like this is generally a foolish practice, but so particularly fond and proud of their town are the citizens of Trieste that it often feels as though it really does possess a communal will of its own. At the start of the twenty-first century something remarkable happened to its spirit. It was as though it had been given a course of Viagra, and rediscovered its lost vigour at last—a civic virility that has come too late for me, and can only be fulfilled after my time.

What had happened? Perhaps it was Ricardo lily’s confident administration, which encouraged the city to look outwards once again, instead of permanently pondering its own disabilities. Perhaps it was the advent of a new Europe, which seemed to offer Trieste a revival of old opportunities. Perhaps it was the energizing spread of globalization. Perhaps it was a general feeling that Trieste could prosper best by being entirely itself, a city unique in geography as in history: “FUK NATIONS,” said that graffito on the refuse bin, back on page 133, and perhaps the old place had reached the same conclusion for itself. Or perhaps, like a sheep farmer facing ruin in Wales, it simply realized in its civic heart that the only sensible alternative was diversification. It could no longer have one purpose: it must have many.

IT MAINTAIN S its oldest functions. It is still a sort of capital, and four authorities have their seat here. A Prefect represents the sovereignty of Rome, like the empire’s Governor long ago, and in the same palace. A Mayor runs the city from his offices below Michel and Japhez. One President heads the Provincial Government of Trieste, from his headquarters around the square from the General Post Office; another, established in the old Lloyd Triestino palace in the Piazza Unita, presides over the Autonomous Region of Friuli- Venezia Giulia.

Trieste is still an important great insurance centre, and of course it is still a port—no longer one of the world’s great ports, but still the fifth port of the Mediterranean. Lloyd Triestino belongs to Taiwanese owners now, but a few of its container ships still sail from Trieste to places like Jeddah, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, which have known the house flag for generations: the successor to its palatial old headquarters of the Piazza Unita, the one with Mercury and Neptune on its balustrade, is a glittering glass palace almost overlooking its original Arsenal, the one with the cardboard tower and the lions. Most of the ships come and go from Muggia bay now, but the ferry from Greece still sails from the Molo Bersaglieri, and the Albanian ferry docks at the Old Port that Francis Joseph opened long ago. If there are no great liners or warships on the stocks of Trieste, there is generally a glittering cruise ship having a refit in the very same shipyards.

The port of Trieste still has a customs-free zone, last remnant of the Free Port that Charles VI decreed, and it has revived some old links with the European interior. A mile or two up the bay from the shipyards a long thin jetty protrudes into the sea, and moored at it are generally a couple of tankers. They are pumping oil ashore from the Middle East, as the freighters of the old Trieste unloaded their Egyptian cotton and their Damascene silks upon the piers around the promontory: and just as those old staples of the entrepot found their way by road or railway over the Karst to central Europe, so the tankers’ oil travels by trans-alpine pipeline far into the European interior, to be turned into gasoline by refineries in Austria, in the Czech Republic or at Ingolstadt in the heart of Bavaria.

Another tradition of the port robustly survives, too. Down among the industrial clutter of the docks you may detect a magnificent smell in the air—only a hint to begin with, only a suggestion, until gradually a rich aroma presents itself which, sniffing like a bloodhound, you may trace to a particular installation somewhere around Pier 7. It is a classic fragrance of Trieste: the smell of coffee. It pervaded the streets of the city in its prime, in the days when coffee was kept in huge barrels outside every cafe, and this aromatic dock building is still Europe’s No. 1 warehouse of the coffee trade. Coffee from around the world arrives here, and is distributed across all Europe—or processed by Signor lily’s people and sent back across the seas again.

TOURISM is the first alternative that suggests itself, when diversification is needed—even the Welsh farmer immediately thinks of caravan parks. Joyce liked the fact that Trieste was in no sense a tourist city, unlike Rome, which suggested to him a man making a living by exhibiting the corpse of his grandfather. Fortunately Trieste can never become one of your centres of mass tourism, crassly subjecting its true nature to the satisfaction of its visitors. It has no sandy beaches and few great sights: package tourists will always do better in Venice, or in the seaside resorts of Dalmatia. Nevertheless at the start of a new century Trieste is self-consciously sprucing itself up for visitors. Streets have been pedestrianized, piazzas resurfaced, roads re-aligned, museums modernized, tracks laid for a magnetic tram service. In the summer one outdoor festival succeeds the next—sand was especially brought in, in 2000, for the Beach City World Volley-Ball Tournament on the waterfront—and the nostalgic songs of Signor Lupi compete with the beat of rock groups from the hangar of the Maritime Air Station.

I once dropped in upon a meeting of tourist developers at Muggia, the Venetian port which is now part of Trieste province, and asked one of them what he thought they could do with the little place. “Do with it?” he cried. “Do with it? It is a Portofino waiting to be discovered!”—and he had a point, for it does have all the prerequisites, a picturesque harbour filled with boats, quaint backstreets, an exquisite piazza, a castle elegantly positioned on the hill above. I have twice given myself lunch at the Trattoria Risorto, by the harbour, and each time the Mayor of Muggia has been lunching there too, deep in discussion with business folk, and envisaging, I would guess, the Portofinization of his fief.

Then there is cultural tourism. With its university and its ever-enterprising publishers, Trieste has never been slow to capitalize upon its past. Books about itself come in a steady stream from its presses, to pile up on booksellers’ tables and congest the shelves of my own library. There has always been Winckelmann, of course, and lately the shrewd Trieste publicists have realized the universal appeal of a lost monarchy. Now that the passions of Italianity have faded somewhat they are exploiting the Habsburgs for all they are worth. Miramare is the chief single tourist attraction of Trieste, and now it is supplemented by sundry Habsburgian allusions. Maximilian himself has been elevated almost to the status of a myth—“That was a gift from
Maximilian”
I once heard a guide sanctimoniously telling a group in the cathedral, pointing to a chandelier as though it were a sacred relic. Much is made of imperial influences upon the Trieste cuisine, in tortes and strudels and a luncheon snack called the
rebechin
, involving things like pork, tripe, goulash, sausages and Prague ham. The operetta festival at the Teatro Verdi has become a decidedly imperial event: audiences rise to their feet not only for the Italian national anthem, but also for the Radetzky March. Sissy is back near the railway station, where the Balkan market was, postcards of the Father of his People are on sale in souvenir stalls, the old coffee-shops are promoted as Historic Cafes and Trieste’s writers of the Habsburgian years are celebrated as they never were in the days when they had trouble finding publishers for their books.

In its dying years the Austro-Hungarian Empire found itself immortalized in a flowering of prose and poetry—often, rather like itself, essentially atmospheric or allusive, charged with wry and nebulous regret. It found its last laureates all over its territories, and three of the most celebrated wrote in this Urbs Fidelissima beside the sea. Italo Svevo the Triestino ironically commemorated lives and love in an essentially commercial city; James Joyce the Irishman extrapolated his view of Trieste into a view of the world; Rainer Maria Rilke from Prague was inspired, on a day of the bora in 191 2, to write the best-loved of modern elegies. All prosper greatly in Trieste now. Hundreds of people come to attend the university’s annual Joyce School, or study at its Laboratorio Joyce. Hundreds more follow the Joyce Trail, the Svevo Trail or the Rilke Path, armed with maps and pamphlets provided by the tourist authority, and pursuing in fact as in fiction the memories of the three writers—from site to site, apartment to villa, Golden Key brothel to Stella Polaris cafe, bench outside the railway station to guest quarters above the sea (for Rilke stayed in the princely castle of Duino, along the coast).

TRIESTE is re-inventing itself as a centre of science. It is up on the Karst, says one of the splendidly glossy promotional brochures that are the literature of the new Trieste,
^a
on these hills from which the most ancient inhabitants of these lands used to look out to sea, that the Trieste of the third millennium is being constructed.” It is true that up there startling things have been happening. There is AREA, a great science park where scores of enterprising companies do research into the human papilloma virus or lignocellulose degradation processes! There is ELETTRA the Light Machine, which produces extra-penetrative X-rays! There is the Experimental Geophysics Laboratory, which monitors endogenous phenomena deep in the Grotta Gigante! But all over the city, too, a bewildering variety of scientific institutions has developed—a centre for theoretical physics, a neuroscience centre, a Centre for Advanced Research in Space Optics, a school for advanced physics studies.

Many of these organizations have international links. The World Organization for Women’s Science, for instance, is based in Trieste, with a president from Swaziland and vice-presidents from Nigeria, Cuba, Egypt and India. The Third World Academy of Science is here too, and so is the directorate of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering, with scores of subscribing countries and, I am sorry to say, its own Animal House. The conference centre on the Molo Bersaglieri is frequented by learned societies from all over the world. Optimists believe all this heralds a new place for Trieste on the map—a new dimension for the city. Mayor Illy himself wrote a booklet describing Trieste as “A Gateway to the New Europe,” and suggesting that the new Trieste can be “an effective point of reference for the entire European Union.” As the countries of eastern Europe are integrated with the European countries, so the theory goes, Trieste will once more be a Mediterranean outlet for a vast continental entity, standing at the very junction of east and west. Transportation, finance, science, tourism—diversification, Illy said, should be “united by the common element of the city’s international character” to create a harmonious and unified Trieste System.

IT WAS a dream, he said, but it seems to be a galvanizing dream. Trieste’s first summer of the new century—my last summer in Trieste—was a season transformed. For the first time in my experience Trieste felt a young city, perhaps a hyper-active city. More bronzed young sunbathers than ever packed the promenade of Barcola, flat out, buttock to bosom, along the stony shore, and scullers in the bay cockily swapped badinage with the elderly anglers on the Molo Audace.

Every morning something new and startling greeted me, when I walked through the streets after breakfast. If it was not a World Power-Boat Championship it was an International Exhibition of Pens, if it was not the Via Dante being repaved it was the Museum Revoltella being re-modelled. Almost every day I found a new series of marquees being erected along the waterfront, or another temporary stage. Music sounded across the city far into the night. There were book fairs, and antique fairs, and a Sissy exhibition, and an exhibition of old gramophone records, and a veteran car parade, and a dance festival, and a medieval festival, and discos, and flea markets, and the Beach City World Volley-Bail Tournament, and rock groups playing wherever you looked. And as that first bright summer faded, and autumn crept in with its promise of boras and gloomy streets again, there was celebrated the Barcolana, one of the chief yachting festivals of Europe, and Trieste’s one great living spectacle. The city prepared for it as a last fling of the season, and in a thoroughly nautical way. Every store displayed a maritime motif. Every hotel was full of yachtsmen. Another long parade of white marquees went up, offering every kind of seagoing accessory or gimmick, and outside the opera house the Association of Bakers set up a demonstration galley, where the bakers worked in full sight of everyone, and gave away free buns. Eighteen hundred yachts had assembled for the contest.

That October the ruffian wind of Trieste blew in early. The trees were whipped by it, the sea was heavy, rain poured down and mists magnificently swirled. As the regatta assembled for the start, beyond Miramare, the central harbour came thrill-ingly to life with speedboats, inflatables and rescue craft. A big white Coastguard cutter stood ready at the Molo Bersaglieri. A helicopter came and went from the Molo Audace. Loudspeakers boomed across the waterfront. All day long crowds surged this way and that, and the myriad flags and pendants of the festival fluttered in angry parallel through the tempest. It was a scene of mighty animation. More boats battled against the wild sea that day than I had seen in my life before—perhaps more boats than
anyone
had seen, yachts of all sizes, yachts of all classes, their sails spread far over the water in the wind, the spray and the gathering darkness.