Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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The iron curtain which was erected just east of Trieste was always flimsy, so that thousands of English holidaymakers hopped over it and were welcomed by Slovenians and Croatians on the other side. Just when the anecdotes start to get a little cloying and you’re starting to wonder where she’s going with all of them, Morris wraps up the book—her last, she says--with a magnificent chapter that explains why Trieste has been significant to her throughout the years. The Viennese playwright Hermann Bahr, arriving there in 1909, said he felt as though he was suspended in unreality, as if he were ‘nowhere at all’. Morris delights in sharing many Triestine experiences and slips in appealing nuggets of information which she has gleaned over the years: there is a street in the Old City named after the bora, the ferocious wind that blows through it in winter; the former mayor, Riccardo Illy, 'never wears a tie with his beautiful modish suits'; a poll in 1999 claimed that 70 per cent of Italians did not know Trieste was in Italy at all. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared… The Caffè Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct… Those silken and epauletted passengers, with all they represented, have vanished from the face of Europe, and I am left all alone listening to the band.

The city is somewhere I came very close to visiting on a long overland trek from Beijing to Basel via 14 countries back in 2008. Her descriptions of the cityscape reminded me of another port city that was losing its meaning, thanks to a tunnel that had taken away much of its ferry traffic – Aomori in Japan.

No fim de contas, Morris celebra Trieste como «A capital de lugar nenhum», uma terra de acolhimento para todos os que, como ela, sempre se sentiram um pouco perdidos, sem nunca chegarem verdadeiramente a encontrar uma pátria. one of the most impressive and subtle meditations on old age that I have read, much more than mere smudges of grafitti on a wall.

Is this why, so out of the way, that Trieste as Jan Morris describes, avoided the paranoid delusions of nation states killing each other through the centuries, as empire, colonialism and power-lust rent its way through each generation?

I have to say that a lot of this is rather eerily reminiscent of the history of Odessa that I read earlier in the year.

She was from an earlier generation, one that learnt history couched in patriotism underpinned by nationalism and its desire for power, where the language of race and racial difference was unchallenged by the holders of privilege. Probably, this fact is why, if the book had imbued with melancholy, it opens on the future by announcing possible evolutions of the city (it is a chapter which is welcome).Hitchhiking up the Adriatic coast just north of Split, we were picked up by a guy delivering tyres not to Trieste, as we had hoped, but instead to Zagreb. Having eulogised the trilogy to Mrs Arukiyomi (who has, tellingly, yet to actually start it), I found myself staring at a copy of Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere on Christmas morning. But at the end of the first world war in 1919, Trieste found itself separated from the Habsburg empire, joined to the newly invented Yugoslavia kingdom and the united kingdom of Italy. My tour guide, a lifelong Triestina, whose grandmother studied English under Joyce’s younger brother Stanislaus.

In Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris explores a place that had deep personal meaning to her. Reputada autora de livros de viagens, este é um dos seus livros mais belos, circunstância a que não é estranho o tom de despedida que perpassa por estas páginas. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Thinking about how Morris perceived race, it flickered into my mind that all those who use ‘woke’ as an insult for people who want to address those social injustices are scared. 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.Both were cosmopolitan port cities that were created out of fiat from small towns, by the Catherine the Great and the Hapsburg Emperor respectively.