The Joyce of Trieste
As well as a tortured, twisting history this town has given us style, charm, strudel and...
But for James Joyce, few of us might have heard of Trieste, the enchanting Italian city where he lived for 15 years. It was here he came to literary prominence, writing A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, most of Dubliners and the outline of Ulysses.
With its Viennese-style coffee houses and twisted, cobbled streets it’s easy to see why Joyce was so enamoured with the place. However, to say he got off to a rocky start is putting it mildly. Within hours of arriving here in 1904, he was in jail – after interfering in a fight between English sailors and locals. Beat that Leopold Bloom!
Fortunately, Joyce redeemed himself, writing and teaching English, and a very respectable statue of him stands on a bridge over the Grand Canal.
These days, besides its Joycean legacy and intriguing beauty, Trieste retains a shadowy Cold War atmosphere – it’s not surprising to discover it was once a thriving Austro-Habsburg port.
After WWI, Trieste was ceded to Italy. The old town, the Città Vecchia, is where Mitteleuropa meets the Mediterranean with the 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 ‘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-Habsburg cafes restored.
Trieste is ideally situated for day trips to Venice and former Yugoslav nations. And it’s a gourmet’s delight. It is also the birthplace of the ubiquitous Illy coffee brand.
A must-see is the Savoia Excelsior Palace, built in 1911 by Emperor FranzJosephIofAustria.In1914,his nephew and heir Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, leading to WWI. After WWII, Yugoslav partisans claimed Trieste, occupying it for 40 blood-soaked days in 1945. After nine years being governed by the British and US military, it was re-annexed to Italy in 1954. In its heyday under Austria, Trieste attracted a diversity of peoples. This cosmopolitan tradition is maintained in the Caffè degli Specchi, where waiters with Franz Joseph moustaches serve slices of Viennese strudel cake.
When not teaching English, Joyce drank in the Caffè San Marco behind the synagogue. His pupils included Italo Svevo, Trieste’s most famous writer – whose work was almost unnoticed until Joyce became his private English tutor in 1907.
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 and house music.
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.
A 15-minute drive took me to the giant obelisk marking the Slovenian border. The Carsic Plain, some 100km wide, stretches east into a beautiful rolling landscape. I visit an osmiza, a farmhouse-cumeating-place, in the hamlet of Praprot. The osmize of the Carso are an essential part of any visit to Trieste, this most melancholy and beautiful of cities. No wonder Joyce was so besotted.