Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2 page)

ONE
A City Down the Hill

If you come to it by car over the Karst, all the same, Trieste looks perfectly self-explanatory. The road crosses the border out of Slovenia and reaches the village of Opicina, where the plateau abruptly falls away through pine-woods towards the sea. There, a tall obelisk marks the beginning of the city. It was erected in 1830 to commemorate the completion of the first proper highroad across the Karst, connecting Vienna with its seaport on the Adriatic. Now the monument is peeling and neglected, and its setting is suburban, but when it was new, it told the grateful traveller that his journey across the wasteland was over, and he was reaching a haven of imperial order—an up-to-date Mediterranean outpost of the empire of the Habs-burgs. The young Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Joseph Maximilian came this way in 1850 and thought the Karst a cursed desert, but he saw the distant appearance of the obelisk as a symbol of hope, and urged his coachman to get a move on.

For me an element of hope is the essence of cityness, and when I see a city in the distance, out of the open country, I always get a move on myself. The more isolated the city, the more hopeful, because then it offers a more spectacular contrast to the bucolic world outside. Until lately the cycle of the countryside was regular and foreseeable, governed by the seasons and the primeval needs of agriculture: the harvests came and went, the lambs were born and slaughtered, sowing and reaping, calving and hay-making—day after day, year after year, the dutiful round proceeded. All being well, there were no surprises. Even the advent of silage and artificial fertilizers, even the prospect of genetic interference, has not yet freed rural living from its age-old routines. Winter or summer, rain or shine, sharp at six o’clock every morning of his life my neighbour Alwyn Parry drives up our lane in his pickup to prepare the cows for milking.

But the city! There matters change by the hour, and people too. The city bursts with ideas as with traffic, a swirl of newness and surprise. Who can be bored in a city? If you are tired of one activity you can try something else, change your job, take your custom to another restaurant. Most human progress has been engendered in cities. While the farmer ploughed his same old furrow, supervised by priest and landlord and succeeded when the time came by sons and grandsons, away in the city people were devising new ways of living, dressing, thinking, eating and believing. “Had I but plenty of money,” the poet said (Browning again), “Money enough and to spare, / The house for me, no doubt, were a house in a city square. / Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!” I agree with him, lifelong country-dweller though I am. In our own times urbanism has begun to overwhelm the rural way of things, but there is still enough disparity between town and country to make me prod my postilion when I see a city down the hill.

SURREAL? Hypochondriac? Subliminal? Surely not. Our first sight of Trieste from the Opicina obelisk, high on the ridge above the city limits, is as reassuring now as it was in Maximilian’s time. The city sprawls before us apparently explicit and composed, and its setting is superb. If the weather is fine we can see it all, there and then, like a diagram of its history. Trieste lies around two bays, the bay of Trieste to the north, the bay of Muggia to the south, separated by a promontory—
The
Promontory, Triestini used to call it. The coastline stretches away towards Split and Croatia one way, towards Venice and Italy the other, with the blue hilly outline of Istria to the south, the flat shore of Friuli-Venezia Giulia to the north and west. Often this tremendous scene is blurred—by rain or fog in the winter, by heat-haze in the high summer—but sometimes it is almost preternaturally clear, and then one can fancy a flash of sunshine from the golden domes of San Marco in Venice, seventy miles away across the waters.

On a little hill below us, beside Trieste’s northern bay, stands the original walled settlement of the city, known to the Illyri-ans, the Romans and the Venetians. It has a cathedral and a citadel upon its summit, a Roman amphitheatre in its flank, and its medieval tumble of streets is still recognizable, running down to the waterfront—the pattern of the small fortified port that grew out of Tergeste, and was perhaps rather like a less formidable Dubrovnik. Nowadays Trieste’s Old City is partly obliterated by modern development, partly dingy with age, partly prettied up, and has lost most of its ancient pride; but beside and around it, overpowering its consequence, is the city the Habsburgs built as their imperial port.

The prospect of this other Trieste, much of it gleaming new in Maximilian’s day, must have cheered him up with its promise of white tablecloths and decent beds. This was a universal compensation of imperialism, and his contemporaries in British India found their spirits similarly rising when their trains drew into Bombay or Lahore out of the endless Indian plains. “See you at the Club!” they cried to each other in relief, as they hurried off to their hansom cabs, and Maximilian, after a look at the view from the Obelisk (which still gets a capital O in Trieste), doubtless hastened back to his carriage, shuffling the leaves from his boots, in the same expectant frame of mind. There in the lee of a wilderness Habsburg Trieste was built, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with all urban refinements. Its design was logical, its buildings were substantial, its streets were spacious, its manner was amply complacent, for it was a mercantile city, a port city, built for the job. It was not primarily concerned with politics, grace or leisure, like its architectural contemporaries St. Petersburg, Calcutta or Bath. Hard work and enterprise were its hallmarks, but its builders knew that creature comfort was next to profitability. It was a thoroughly modern and efficient urban machine.

Today both old and new Trieste are invested by industrial works and nondescript suburbs of the last century, but from Opicina an imaginative eye can still see their first relationship—an imperial relationship again, one settlement vastly dominating the other. The one is still cramped beneath its castle, ves-tigially walled: the other confidently faces the sea, with quays and jetties all along its waterfront, a grand splash of a piazza opening directly upon the Adriatic, and a lighthouse on a mole enclosing the harbour. The little medieval town has a certain delicacy to its muddle; the big Habsburg city has no subtlety, only measured swank. From one you might hear the music of lutes and madrigals, from the other oom-pah-pah. For a contemporary parallel you have only to go down the holiday coast into Croatia, where proud old Venetian cities are awash in concrete hotels and camping sites: but again the contrast would be familiar enough to officers of British India, because the complex alleys of castellan Trieste stand amidst the symmetry of the Austrian city rather like an Indian bazaar town beside a neat and whitewashed cantonment of the Raj.

Yet time and setting have made a unity of them (as they often have of the bazaar and the cantonment, and even of the camp-sites and the campaniles). At the start of the twenty-first century there are few modern structures down there, by the standards of most European cities. Trieste was not badly damaged by the wars, and high-rise buildings are rare—local guidebooks call a six-storey structure a
grattacielo
, a skyscraper. If we look selectively enough towards the city centre we still see much of what Maximilian saw, except that in his day the northern bay down there, the bay of Trieste, was massed with masts and riggings, and there were ships tied up at all those jetties, steamboats coming and going and wagons rumbling along cobbled piers. “All motion and animation,” Maximilian thought it then. If a warship of the Imperial Navy sailed in she was greeted with a gun-salute from the castle, and a muffled echo would reach up here to the Obelisk itself.

Today that bay is more subdued. Farther away from us a new port has arisen, around the promontory in Muggia bay, and we can see tankers and container vessels moored there, or coming in and out: but immediately below us the central waterfront of Trieste, during a few grand generations the sea-gate of an empire, is likely to be without any ships at all.

FOR THE view from the Obelisk is hallucinatory, like our glimpse of Venice in the sunshine. Only for a century or so was Habsburg Trieste as assured as it looks from the hill. It was an
ad hoc
port, deliberately chosen and developed for imperial purposes, and ports are more vulnerable than most cities to the vagaries of history. Across the world we may see famous old havens now neglected or debased, sometimes simply because modern ships need deeper water or different facilities, but sometimes because their fundamental purpose has been lost. Everywhere once vigorous waterfront areas have been emasculated or mutated, with reconstituted flagstones and fancy fittings, warehouses turned into trendy apartments, novelty shops smelling of pot-pourri, dry docks filled in for more office space. The quays where the lovely clippers berthed in Manhattan now form a maritime museum. The docks in London where the East Indiamen unloaded their jutes and spices have been turned into Docklands, a grim modish city of corporations. Bristol and Liverpool, once great bases of the Atlantic trade, now find themselves on the wrong side of Britain for the European markets, just as one day Hong Kong may wish it were on the mainland of China after all. Nearly everywhere the jumble of port life, with all its stinks, noises and clashing colours, has been removed from city centres, and so from the public consciousness.

Much of this happened to Trieste too, abruptly before its time. The port was not outmoded in any technical sense. It was simply made irrelevant by the collapse of the empire that created it, and it has never been the same again. Empires come and go, and their functions go with them. There may be a vessel or two down there—a warship perhaps, a car-ferry, a tug, a tourist hydrofoil—and we can see the usual conglomeration of yachts and launches in the inevitable city marina. But the bay of Trieste looks a regretful bay. It can never be what it was, and reminds us from the start, as I was first reminded half a century ago, that this city was built to a lost purpose.

Trieste awaits us notwithstanding. “Hurry up, coachman,” Maximilian calls as his carriage pulls away from the Obelisk, “the Governor is expecting us for dinner.” We ourselves just press the accelerator, remembering that we haven’t got a hotel reservation. Whichever century we inhabit, down we go, down the hairpin bends from Opicina, our leather seats creaking or our plastic dashboards rattling, down from the Karst into the grey streets of Trieste (or Triest, as the Austrians spell it, or Trst as the Slovenes prefer, and the Croats down the road).

TWO
Preferring a Blur

We need not really hurry. His Excellency the Governor is of course honoured to receive the Archduke any time he arrives in the city, and we shall find that there are plenty of vacancies at the Albergo Ducha d’Aosta. Trieste can be a bewildering city, but it is habitually free of hassle. You can
drift
through this place, thinking about something else, as easily as anywhere in Europe. Its traffic generally stops for you at pedestrian crossings. Its buskers and beggars thank you politely if you give them something, and do not reproach you if you decline. Everyone seems pleased to be helpful.

It is not, mind you, a city made for pedants: the shop you want has probably adjourned for the holidays, the museum is temporarily closed for refurbishing, you’ve just missed the bus owing to schedule changes, the gallery is not in the telephone book and opens only in the summer season. But for the drifter it is just right. Even in the 1900s, when Trieste was in its powerful prime, it was a loitering kind of place. The English writer Robert Hitchens thought it half-asleep. Joyce liked walking about it, polishing phrases in his head. Italo Svevo wrote a novel largely concerned with strolling its streets, and the poet Umberto Saba composed a lyric about wandering the entire city contemplating his own “grave evasive life”—my own practice exactly, except for the gravity.

SO OUR entry into Trieste is unlikely to be demanding. Since we have arrived in the evening
(vide
the Governor’s dinner party) and on a day in the fall
(cf
Maximilian’s shuffling of the leaves) the traffic is thick, but not frenzied. There is not much blasting of horns—road-rage is not a Trieste failing—or blowing of police-persons’ whistles. When the street lights come on they are subdued, and at the end of an autumn day’s work the city hardly feels as though it is preparing for an evening out, only ambling home to the game shows on TV.

It is hardly an inspiring introduction, either. The outskirts of the city are shabby, drab and colourless, the downtown centre is sombre. Statues, fountains and frescos are everywhere, but in the gathering dusk all seems monochrome. Heavy arcaded streets lurch in parallel past our windows, with pompous palaces of plutocracy one after the other, a Gothically steepled church here, a stately railway station there. The General Post Office is enormous. The Banca d’Italia is immense. The Palace of Justice is foreboding. Steep stone staircases link one street with another. A tunnel inexplicably disappears into a hillside. What looks like a prison is only an old dock warehouse. What is surely the Prefect’s Palace is a branch office of an insurance company. Paul Theroux, recording his impressions of Trieste in 1995, employed the adjectives
serious, gloomy, dull, solemn
and
lugubrious
. To me Trieste on an autumn evening suggests the work of those English Victorian painters who specialized in seaports at the end of the day, with pale gaslight shining on wet pavements, and pub windows dimly illuminated. Also at such twilight moments I find it easy to imagine a Trieste handed over to the authority of some now defunct People’s Republic, as it so nearly was in 1945, to be re-created swart, suspicious and smelling of sausages.

But if after checking in at the hotel we stroll around the corner to a restaurant, we shall find it, on the contrary, comfortably bourgeois. No fragrance of offal here, only of mushrooms or vegetable soup. The furnishings are plush, the lights are not glaring, near the door there is a serving-wagon loaded with fish on ice. No more than a dozen customers, I would say, are at their victuals in this decorous retreat, and they all look like members of the upper middle classes, of a certain age: doctors and their wives, we may surmise, a few academics, a bookseller perhaps, a couple of cultivated businessmen. They all seem to know each other, swopping pleasantries across the tables and eyeing one another’s dresses without embarrassment. They listen with attention to each other’s conversations, they are careful not to notice when a rucksacked couple comes in wearing jeans and T-shirts, and they are all clearly well-known to the management. For that matter so am I, if this is, as I rather think it is, the same restaurant at whose table, in 1978, I wrote with vinous pleasure in the book I was reading “Am I really
paid
to do this?”

And yes, presently the proprietor, excusing himself from his conversation with the obvious Professor of Slav Linguistics eating alone at the corner table, comes over to greet me. “How are things?” I ask him. “Much the same,” he tonelessly replies, sweeping a hand around his half-empty restaurant. “We are still happy.”

HE WAS surely speaking only half in irony, because it always seems to me that despite its public disappointments down the years, privately this city is generally content. In the morning, when we go out for our first daylight drift through town, if the weather is friendly we shall find it far more benign than we did last night. Those overbearing structures do not seem so severe, when sunshine and shadow flicker through the arcades, and the mathematical street plans turn out to possess a certain elegance. Nobody could call Trieste a picturesque or exquisite city. It has no lovely city parks and few buildings that you feel you could pick up, to my mind a characteristic of great architecture—think of the Chrysler Building, or the Doge’s Palace, or the Romanesque chapels of Spain! When the sun shines, however, Trieste does have charm. As in all cities built to grid patterns, it can be difficult to know where you are, which way you are facing, whether the sea is this way or that: but often enough the wooded slopes of the Karst appear between the buildings, to set you more or less straight, or there is a glimpse of blue water across an intersection.

The city’s first eighteenth-century planners built a neat pattern of streets around a short canal, the Canal Grande, which intruded into the city from the sea and was to provide safe moorings for sea-going ships, whatever the weather. This arrangement is still a pleasure to discover. The canal runs inland for a few hundred yards from the bay, and it is only about thirty feet wide, but handsome Neo-classical buildings line it, and at the end there stands a domed church, with Ionic columns in a grand portico, which gives a touch of ceremony to the ensemble. The canal is full of small boats, some of them half-submerged, a few actually sunk, almost all needing a lick of paint; three or four of the most derelict, hauled out of the water at the entrance to the canal, have been so splashed with vivid paints and graffiti, and are disposed so gracefully there, that they look like works of contemporary art. The canal quays are lively enough, if a bit shabby, and half-way up there is an outdoor market in a square, with mounds of fruit and vegetables, racks of dresses, flowers, socks and Mars bars.

Not too bad, you may think, your spirits rising rather. It is true that later architectural developments are less jolly even in the daylight—piles of nineteenth-century commerce, arid exercises in twentieth-century monumentalism—but there are many cheerful incidentals and exceptions. Perambulating central Trieste may not be exhilarating, but it is seldom dull. The lumpish offices of the city’s boom days are still comically resplendent, inside and out, with allegorical images of aspiration and success. The private houses of long-dead bankers or shipowners, Gothic, Neo-classic or defiantly eclectic, stand on advantageous corners in glorious grandiloquence. Exercises in Art Nouveau, called here the Liberty Style, display gigantic bare-busted ladies guarding doorways or precariously ornamenting ledges. What’s this, now? A Roman amphitheatre. Who’s that? Verdi, composing, on a plinth in a garden. Which way are we going? Search me.

It is easy to get away from it all, anyway. Take a lane into
città yecchia
, the Old City, clamber up its steep slope through a mi-nuscule piazza, like a village square with groceries and bric-a-brac stores in it, skirt a Roman archway and a couple of churches, and soon we shall find ourselves on the flat summit of St. Giusto’s hillock, where the citadel is, and the cathedral. This was the original city centre, but for the moment it need not, as the old Baedekers used to say, long detain us. As a whole it has a laboured institutional air. The Romans built their forum up here, and there are a few carefully repositioned columns around, together with war memorials, cemeteries, gardens of remembrance, a collection of armour, a lapidary museum and other such municipal essentials. Still, the air is fresh and the views are fine: and when we have seen enough, and taken a cup of coffee at one of the outdoor stalls in the cathedral piazza, it is agreeable to wander down again, past the hillside villas, past the Roman arch, through the quiet little square, past the junk shops into the working streets below.

I PREFER a civic blur to a sight-seeing tour, which is why we have meandered the town in this throw-away manner. Fortunately for me Trieste has few formal sights to see. “The average traveller,” Cook’s Handbook pronounced in 1925, “would not make a point of staying long in Trieste,” and in 1999 an American magazine writer advised that after five days “you’ve done the place.” Again no need to hurry, then. When we feel like a long light lunch we can potter down to the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, the Piazza Unità for short, the eye of the city and the lingering spot par excellence.

It is more festive than most of Trieste. On its western side it opens directly on to the sea, and it is said to be the largest square in Italy. The big buildings surrounding it are splendidly self-satisfied (“rather showy, but imposing,” allowed Cook’s Handbook). Flags fly from the former Governor’s Palace. Bold masonry allegories look down from the immense old headquarters of the greatest of all Trieste institutions, the shipping line Lloyd Triestino
(nata
Lloyd Adriatico). Our hotel over the way there flies the Italian flag too, and flaunts the proud date MDCCCLXXIII—near the prime of the place. The long mock-Gothic structure with the clock tower is the Municipality (Michez and Jachez, the two bronze Moors on the top, strike all the twenty-four hours), and here we are ourselves sitting at a table outside the Caffe degli Specchi, the Cafe of the Mirrors, which has been comforting its customers with coffees, wines and toasted sandwiches since the days of the Emperors.

In the autumn the square is not often crowded, but now that the day has warmed up it has a homely cheerfulness to it. Some emperor or other stands upon a column, pointing peremptorily towards the sea. What looks like a pile of rubble is really a Fountain of the Four Continents, celebrating Trieste’s profitable connections with the world at large, and equipped with sculpted bales of commerce, like the opium crates that used to appear upon the crest of that other merchant metropolis, Hong Kong. Two tall bronze flagstaffs await a more significant day of the calendar to fly their ensigns. Here and there around the piazza small boys are kicking a ball about, and little girls daintily promenade with toy prams, occasionally peering in a stagy way at the dolls inside, and proudly watched by gossiping mothers at the café tables.

Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the cafe there! We stretch ourselves and have another coffee—“the coffee of Tri-este,” the waiter assures us approvingly, as though to compliment us on our taste, “is the supreme coffee in the world.” And when we pay our bill and wander off again, in half a minute we are at the water’s edge. The Greek car-ferry moored along the quay sounds its deep siren—it’s ten to four, and it sails upon the hour—and instantly time seems in abeyance. The shouts of the infant footballers are lost, and the wide bay extends before us like a sea of eternity. A tug churns its leisurely way from one pier to another. A solitary man sits over a float that never bobs. And look—remember?—across the water a small white castle stands, all alone, like a castle in a trance.