Majestic Trieste, a city that’s always in bloom
THIS past week in Trieste it’s been wall-to-wall Joyce. James, that is, with the writer’s adopted home marking Bloomsday with a series of events across the city. What a joy for this week’s visitors to Joyce’s adopted city that it was in the summery month of June that Leopold Bloom took his stroll around Dublin. I first visited Trieste three months earlier than that and one of my abiding memories of this most majestic city is just how cold it was that March, with ice-cold gusts sweeping in from the Adriatic as the locals scurried around, all sensibly begloved and swathed in scarves.
Trieste is a place that’s full of surprises. For a start it doesn’t really feel Italian. When I first visited, lured there by the James Joyce connection and having just read Jan Morris’s superb book, Trieste And The Meaning
Of Nowhere, I was struck by how grand it is. Architecturally and in terms of general scale it simply cannot escape its Austro-Hungarian past. Not quite on the gobsmacking scale of somewhere like St Petersburg, nonetheless, the square that is the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, for example, is absolutely vast and echoes with all the elegance that so identified the Austro-Hungarian empire.
You don’t need to be a James Joyce expert to enjoy Trieste. You could easily visit the city without encountering anything Joycean at all – although you will, in strolling around the city, probably come across the rather understated bronze statue of him on a bridge over a canal (there’s another in one of the city parks).
Whether you’re there for Joyce or not, however, there are a few must-sees. For me, one of the highlights is the San Giusto Cathedral. Famous for its beautiful Gothic rose window, the cathedral sits high on the hill in the old part of the city, offering views out over the port and the Adriatic. It’s a lovely part of Trieste – and the castle is also close-by and well worth a visit. When it came to the churches, Joyce preferred San Nicolo, the Greek Orthodox one, with its distinctive twin towers. He was fascinated by the rituals of the Greek-Orthodox religion.
One of the most striking things about Trieste is its café-society vibe. A bit like Vienna in that way, you are spoiled for choice when it comes to atmospheric old coffee houses. Head for Caffe degli Specchi on that vast Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia for the real deal. Here, on the ground floor of one of the most stunning buildings on the square, Caffe degli Specchi, although refurbished in recent years, still operates in much the same way as it did when James Joyce and his literary friends used to hang out here. If you want to go the full James Joyce then you can do a walking tour taking in his various places of residence (eight in total!) during his 16 years spent living here. You don’t have to do a formal tour – just get hold of a Joyce map from one of the tourist offices and off you go. You’ll find that there are numerous plaques around the city commemorating the Irish writer. You’ll discover that the building where he lived at 4 Via Bramante is still there, close to the city’s Basevi gardens, and although the area is now pedestrianised, another home at 32 Via San Nicolo is also still in existence.
The San Nicolo apartment was upstairs from the Berlitz school where Joyce taught English – the job that first brought him to Trieste.
There’s so much more to this city than James Joyce, however. So even if you’ve never opened a copy of Ulysses or been tempted by Portrait Of An Artist, don’t be put off. It’s a great city with a majestic history. You don’t even need to immerse yourself there for a proper holiday.
The first time I visited I just went for the day. So if you find yourself holidaying in northern Italy this summer, just hop on a train and head to Trieste. You won’t regret it. ros.dee@assocnews.ie