Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (5 page)

FIVE
Origins of a Civic Style

In the 1970s I once called upon Baron Rafaelle Douglas de Banfield-Tripcovich in his office at the Teatro Verdi. He was the musical director there, besides being a well-known composer. He struck me as an elegant, worldly, very gentlemanly man, dealing with his affairs in an eminently civilized way—a call from a colleague of the international opera circuit (“Of course, Maestro, see you in Paris” )—an inquiry from his secretary (“Be so good as to tell them that I may be a few moments late”)—matters of score, repertoire or musicianship—a brief exchange about party attitudes in the City Council, where he sat as an independent member. Half-way through my visit he took me over to the window surveying the bay below, and pointed out a stocky little vessel chugging across the harbour towards the mooring berths. “There goes one of my boats,” he said, for as it happened he owned all the Trieste tugs, too.

His was the heritage of an earlier Trieste, a style. Behind the pompous and entertaining fa$ade of the imperial seaport, the waltzes, the uniforms, the Revoltellas and the royal visits, there had arisen over the generations a cultivated bourgeoisie. This was the class of society which had, in my view, held the balance of civilization everywhere, tempering the arrogance of aristocracy, restraining the crudity of the masses. In Trieste it made of a working seaport one of Europe’s more lively and enlightened cities. Here it was an alliance between business and intellect, perhaps a conscious effort to raise the sights of this money-town towards higher things than profit—the Trieste poet Scipio Slataper, who was killed in the first world war, pictured his city waking up one day “between a crate of lemons and a sack of coffee beans” and suddenly realizing its lack of culture. Doubtless the same misgivings had been felt in Chicago, say, where the wealth and confidence made in steel, slaughter-houses and railroads, and the meeting of clever people from many countries, created museums and art galleries, a great university and a celebrated orchestra: or in Manchester, a hard-headed cotton capital, also full of foreigners, that supported the Hallé Orchestra and the
Manchester Guardian
. The governing class of Trieste in its heyday was rich and complex, and its tradition of involvement in civic affairs survives to this day.

This gives one the feeling that local people, rooted in Trieste, still run the city, in a composed way they no longer do in most cities of the western world. It is not strictly true—in Trieste today outside interests, often foreign, control many an old institution—but there are still prominent citizens whose lives overlap the several spheres, economic and artistic, social and political. It is a tradition here. In the 1760s the Count von Konigsbrunn was not only Trieste’s chief of police, but also its theatre director: in the 1830s Josef Ressel was not only a forester, botanist and conservationist, but also the inventor of screw propulsion for ships; in our own time there has been Baron Banfield-Tripcovich and also Ricardo Illy, Mayor of the city at the start of the twenty-first century. Illy is a lightly-built man of contemporary elegance, a style-setter who never wears a tie with his beautifully modish suits, even to the most formal of functions. He is also a highly imaginative politician. And if he looks out of
his
window, as the Maestro-Baron did that day, he is almost sure to see, or at least smell, signs of his own supporting fortune: Illy is one of the great coffee names of the world, and the Mayor’s family company is a mainstay of the Trieste economy.

A COLOURFUL and polyglot proletariat sustained Trieste in its boom days. Every travelling writer mentions its vivacity. The port was by far its chief employer, and men and women from many parts worked in the docks—Albanians, Turks, ear-ringed fisher-people from the Venetian lagoons, giant Montenegrins, Greeks with baggy trousers and Byronic headgear—talking and squabbling and singing in many languages, drinking in their particular taverns, living in their specific quarters of town. They ran the stalls of the city markets. They crowded the sidewalks for religious processions. They jammed the variety shows that were performed in pubs and cafés all over town, and they were exuberant celebrants of Carnival. In their varied peasant costumes, their headscarfs and gaudy waistcoats, they gave the place a constant splash of colour.

There was also a remnant of that ancient aristocracy, the Thirteen Families, the Four Hundred of Trieste. They were called Argento, Baseggio, Bellim, Bonomo, Burlo, Cogitti, Giuliani, Leo, Padovine, Pelligrini, Petazzi, Stella and Toffani. Some still lived at their ancestral addresses in the Old City, where the grandest of them still maintained private chapels, but none of their thirteen sonorous names figure prominently in the annals of Habsburgian Trieste. The last descendant of the Giuliani family, in his youth a philosopher and scientist of repute, died in the city in 1835 all alone and forgotten, and in my imagination I see his peers flitting pale and emaciated through their shadowy lanes while the city erupts into fame around them.

Both classes are unrecognizable now, the vibrant multilingual work force, the attenuated medieval aristocracy. Behind and above them both, though, was that well-heeled business society, solid and earnest, and it flourishes still. It was drawn from many of the peoples that had created the new Trieste, and was sprinkled with nobility old and new. Like the governing classes of Chicago and Manchester, it interested itself assiduously in the arts. The city was rich in theatres and concert-halls, and nothing was too high-brow for their audiences. Ibsen, Strindberg, Wagner were all much admired in Trieste. Toscanini, Nikisch and Mahler all conducted here. One of the very first subscribers to Joyce’s bewilderingly demanding
Ulysses
was the Triestine Greek entrepreneur Ambrogio Ralli, who had to read the book in English, and without any of the explanatory glosses that have alone made it intelligible to most of us. The City Library, with a famous collection of books and manuscripts, was always busy; the Conservatoire of Music was never short of pupils; language schools were in great demand—even Esperanto was popular; the Università Popolare, although it was not really a university, offered public lectures that were attended by thousands of citizens. Scores of cultural institutions flourished, from the scholarly society called the Gabinetto Minerva to debating clubs and a civic madrigal society. Lloyd Adriatico took time off from the ocean trade to publish a series of classic literature. When the Trieste Yacht Works found that a debtor could not pay the bill for his boat repairs, its directors accepted an Egyptian sarcophagus instead, and passed it on to the city.

Opera was immensely popular, and the masterly beadle at the Teatro Verdi, calling up carriages in his powdered wig, was one of the city’s archetypal characters. The opera house itself was a distinguished institution, with a roster of eminent conductors. It was the first anywhere to rename itself after Verdi, and two of his works had their first performances in it (patrons preferred to forget that he didn’t bother to attend the opening night of one,
Il Corsaro
, and later rewrote the other,
Stiffelio
. . .). The business families of Trieste were fervent opera-goers. When Joyce went to a performance, to sit among the “sour reek of armpits” and “phosphorescent farts” of the upper balcony, he often saw in the stalls and boxes below bourgeois pupils of his, following the music with extreme attention: they had probably read the libretto beforehand, and very likely knew the scores too.

These were the great days of the Viennese cafés, as ubiquitous and as popular here as they were in the capital. Trieste was always a bar town, a restaurant town (though hardly a gourmet’s paradise) and especially a coffee-shop town. There had been at least one hundred licensed cafés as early as 1830, and some of them still survive—the Historic Cafés of Trieste, as the tourist people call them now. The Tommaseo, the degli Specchi, the Tergeste, the Stella Polare, the San Marco, all date from Habsburg times, and maintain the high bourgeois tradition. The most suggestive of them is the Caffè San Marco, which is where students and writers still like to drink, talk, work and show themselves off to visitors. When I enter its doors out of the noisy Via Battisti, I feel I am among just the same customers,
mutatis mutandis
, as would have been there a century ago: the students with their text-books spread around them, the professors reading the day’s newspapers, the odd author sucking his pen meditatively over his novel, a scattering of ladies enjoying their daily coffee-talk and one or two flaky philosophers with spectacles, sitting there hour after hour gazing at Time. If the empire still existed, an habitué once remarked to the writer Claudio Magris (as recorded in his book
Microcosms)
, “the world would still be a Caffè San Marco, and don’t you think that’s something, if you take a look out there?”

It was a fine time and place for promenading, too. Trieste women were famously well-dressed, in local variants of Vienna fashions, and were good at showing themselves off. They loved to walk their husbands along the sea on summer evenings, or catch the tram up to the Obelisk to saunter along the ridge, or take an educational stroll around the city’s fountains, or (a favourite evening recreation) visit the extraordinary collection of oriental
objets d’art
that Adolf Wünsch from Moravia displayed above his pasticceria on the Corso. Families would spend a day picnicking in the hill-side park that Baron Revoltella had bequeathed to the city, where the grown-ups could pay their respects to the magnate and his mother, safe in their tombs in their private chapel, while the children could play for hours with the turtles in the pool outside.

THE LEGACIES of this society are still inescapable in Trieste. The families may be extinct, but many of their names are still part of the civic vocabulary, and sometimes their memories live. “Who’s that?” I asked the man behind the counter at the Cosulich Travel Agency on the Via Rossini, pointing to a photograph of a prosperous-looking gentleman on the wall behind his back. “That’s one of the bosses,” he said—and he was referring to the Cosulich brothers, shipowners who died generations before he was born.

One can still follow the trails of those happy promenades. Revoltella’s chapel reminds me of one of those memorial churches that Russians used to erect on battlefields in the days of the Czars, and the turtles are still a delight. The Opicina tram still braves the 26 percent gradient up to the Obelisk, shoved along in the steepest part by a funicular engine. Even a tour of the city fountains can still be fun. Like most such nineteenth-century merchant cities Trieste was lavishly ornamented with civic fountains, but their careers have been precarious because they have constantly been moved as times or tastes have demanded. One year they are spouting in the Piazza della Borsa, the next they are in the Piazza Venezia—I once chanced to see a mobile crane in the very act of lifting the mountainous centre-piece of the Fountain of the Four Continents, to shift it from one spot to another in the Piazza Unità. The one symbolical fountain-figure that can feel reasonably safe is the little putto in the Piazza Ponterosso, beside the Canal Grande: but then Giovannini del Ponterosso has been there since 1753, before bourgeois Trieste existed, and he has long been so beloved among Triestini of all classes that his tenure seems secure.

Most of the civic statuary proudly commemorates the old bourgeoisie, and properly represents its values. My own tastes run to swagger in public monuments—a few admirals and equestrian generals, a duke or two, soldiers indomitable in life, magnificent in death. Habsburg Trieste was not a swaggering city, though, and its Valhalla is reserved for worthies, preferably respectable and responsible citizens of art or learning. Its earthly annexe is the Public Garden at the top of the Via Cesare Battisti, whose gates are guarded by the grandest worthy of them all. Domenico Rossetti, who died in 1842, was of aristocratic origin actually, but as journalist, scholar, historian, humanist, antiquarian and public benefactor he became the great champion of the bourgeois civilization in Trieste. He gave valuable books to the City Library, he founded the Gabinetto Minerva, he financed the tree-shaded boulevard now called Viale XX Settembre, which is still a pleasant place to sit on a hot day and write a philological thesis. Near the top of it is the Politeama Rossetti, one of the city’s two main theatres, and Rossetti himself stands in bronze sentinel over the main gate of the nearby garden. There he is, complacent on his pedestal with a cloak romantically over his shoulders and a forefinger keeping his place in a book, while clambering about his plinth, and flying over it, nymphs or graces reach out to him with olive branches and a flaming torch.

Sheltering behind this high priest of the culture are less executive acolytes. There are twenty-one of them, writers, artists, educators, scientists, musicians, each with his own portrait bust beneath the trees. Most of them are known only in Trieste, a few are internationally famous, but they all stand there, spattered by pigeons, attended by many cats, serenaded by ducks from the duck-pond, with an air of grave dependability. Even Joyce, the one outsider among them, is somehow admitted to the Establishment by the provision of a bronze picture-frame around his head.