Melancholy magic
Trieste’s tortured, twisting history has given it style, charm, strudel and...
WITH its Viennesestyle coffee houses and shadowy Cold War atmosphere, it’s not surprising to discover that Trieste was once a thriving AustroHapsburg port. Germanic influence survives in the clockwork eating habits and the double-headed eagle motifs on buildings in the Austrian Quarter.
After the First World War, Trieste was ceded to Italy. The old town, the Città Vecchia, is where Mitteleuropa meets the Mediterranean in twisted, cobbled streets hung with laundry. On my last visit in 1991, those streets teemed with refugees from Slovenia and Croatia. Yugoslavia was breaking up and Trieste exuded a shabby, Vienna-on-the-Sea atmosphere. ‘Triste Trieste’, Italians called it – ‘sad Trieste’. That was then.
A quarter of a century later, the city is transformed. The neoclassical seafront buildings have been refurbished, the Austro-Hapsburg cafes restored.
Trieste is ideally situated for day trips to Venice and former Yugoslav nations. And it’s a gourmet’s delight. Cafes serve Germanic pork and sauerkraut soup spiced with grated horseradish. The ubiquitous Illy coffee brand, with its Italo-Hungarian origins, is a bonus.
Nostalgia for imperial Vienna can be felt in the dark-panelled cafes off Piazza Unità d’Italia and in the magnificence of the Savoia Excelsior Palace, built in 1911 by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. In 1914, his nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. The equilibrium of Europe was shattered as the First World War broke out.
Following the Second World War, Trieste became a pawn in the tussle between East and West when Yugoslav partisans claimed it, occupying the city for 40 blood-soaked days in 1945. After nine years being governed by the British and American military, the city was re-annexed to Italy in 1954.
FROM my hotel balcony, the Adriatic appeared a wonderful Pernod-green. The liquid softness of the autumn afternoon worked on me like a soporific. Across the Gulf of Trieste shimmered the snowy Julian Alps.
In its heyday under Austria, Trieste attracted a diversity of peoples. This cosmopolitan tradition is maintained in the Caffè degli Specchi, where Harry Lime-type zither music tinkles atmospherically as waiters with Franz Joseph moustaches serve slices of Viennese strudel cake.
In many ways, Trieste is a city where a high bourgeois tradition survives. But that’s not the whole picture. On my way to the opera, I stopped at a champagneria where young Triestini were enjoying tapas to house music provided by DJ Atomic Cat.
A blaze of gold and red plush, the grand Teatro Verdi was as I remembered it from a quarter of a century ago. Opera-goers wore fedora hats, sable stoles and loden overcoats. At the Hostaria Malcanton next door, I was served that most delicious of Adriatic seafood dishes: soar – sardine fillets marinated in lemon juice, onions and pine nuts. Diners chatted in their Triestino dialect infused with Venetian and Slovenian words.
The city’s chief tourist attraction is Miramare Castle, built in the early 19th Century by Franz Joseph’s ill-fated younger brother, Archduke Maximilian.
Trieste’s most famous writer, Italo Svevo, fattish, bald and melancholy, was born in 1861 to an assimilated German-Jewish family. Austrian by citizenship but Italian by cultural preference, he was a whole casebook of Austrian-Adriatic neuroses.
His writing went almost unnoticed until James Joyce became his private English tutor in Trieste in 1907. Joyce spent 15 years in Trieste. When not teaching English, he drank in the Caffè San Marco behind the synagogue. A statue of him stands on a bridge over the Grand Canal.
In addition to Croats and Slo- venes, some 7,000 Serbs live in Trieste today. At the Serb Orthodox church near Joyce’s statue, candles flickered while headscarved women crossed themselves. The gold interior is like a Westerner’s fantasy of the Eastern Byzantine Orient.
The priest told me I should go to Slovenia and explore the Carso Plateau. A 15-minute drive took me to the giant obelisk marking the Slovenian border high above Trieste.
The Carsic Plain, some 60 miles wide, stretches east into a beautiful rolling landscape dotted with orange-yellow fern. The Carso’s hushed atmosphere was emphasised by limestone sink-holes in which Jugoslav partisans reportedly disposed of Italian anti-communists at the war’s end. In the hazy distance, the Istrian plateau was a violetblue line.
I stopped at an osmiza, a farmhouse-cum-eating-place, in the hamlet of Praprot. It belonged to Slovenian wine producer Benjamin Zidarich, whose Vitovska and Malvasia whites are reckoned to be among the best in Europe. The osmiza enjoyed dramatic views over the Adriatic and Venice in the distance. The osmize of the Carso are an essential part of any visit to Trieste, this most melancholy and beautiful of cities.