Trieste is situated on the Adriatic Sea but at a crossroads, and its complicated history can be read from the city’s structures and the structure of the city. It has been a Roman colony, a Byzantine outpost, part of the Holy Roman Empire, occupied by the Republic of Venice, a major Hapsburg city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, occupied by the French during the Napoleonic wars, an independent city-state in the aftermath of WWII (as a buffer zone between Italy and Yugoslavia), and finally, at present, a city in the far northeastern corner of Italy bordered by Slovenia and Croatia. Famed travel writer Jan Morris dubbed it the capital of Nowhere [1], and indeed Trieste’s deep patchwork history has made it a diverse, accepting, and open place. It is no longer (if it ever was) the “torpid terminus of free Europe,” as Anthony Burgess wrote in 1982 [2], but rather a vibrant and grossly underrated destination.
We spent three days and two nights in Trieste on our trip this summer. We visited the Castello di Miramare, a Hapsburg castle, on our way into the city, and took in the majestic Piazza Unità d’Italia. The piazza is bordered on three sides by Austro-Hungarian buildings and by the Adriatic on the fourth. We walked paths that Sigmund Freud, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce must have walked, and indeed Joyce grappled with the first few chapters of Ulysses during his time in Trieste. He writes in a letter to his brother, “I would like to go back to Trieste because I remember some nights walking along the streets in the summer and thinking over some of the phrases in my stories” [3]. I would like to go back to Trieste because I remember some nights walking along the streets in summer and thinking over some of the stories in my life.
TRIESTE, ITALY
- Morris, Jan. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Simon & Schuster, 2001.
- Burgess, Anthony. “In the footsteps of James Joyce: Trieste.” The New York Times, 17 Jan. 1982.
- Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann, London, Faber and Faber, 1975, p. 151.