by Jan Morris
No such prevarication had been necessary when, in the great days of the system, His Excellency had instantly determined that a 21A or a 42B did not merit a street name on its number-plate.
FOUR
Only the Band Plays On
K u K, all the same, never lost its spell over Trieste. Charles VI is that peremptory emperor on his column in the Piazza Unita. Leopold I holds his orb and sceptre above the Piazza Borsa and the Empress Elizabeth, “Sissy,” Franz Joseph’s wayward Bavarian wife, stands in the shade of the trees outside the railway station. Official buildings of the imperial prime still dominate many streets like so many mummified swells. Banks and insurance offices boast of old glories, with their marble and mahogany counters, their mosaic floors and their portentous statuary: within my own memory you had to bang a big silver bell with your hand to get attention in such a place, your cheque was authorized by rubber stamps with big wooden handles, and your money was discharged with a masterly hiss through a polished brass tube.
It is easy to enter the home of one of imperial Trieste’s presiding grandees. It is a museum now, but a very personal one—a museum of him, really. Baron Pasquale Revoltella was an enormously rich bachelor, Venetian by origin, who had made his fortune by sometimes dubious speculations in grain, timber and meat. He spent a short time in jail, but worked his way back to respectability, and converted himself in later years into an archetypal tycoon of Franz Joseph’s Trieste. He had a finger in a multitude of pies. He was a founder of the Assicurazioni Generale, one of the greatest of European insurance companies, and he owned the Hôtel de la Ville, the best in town. Most profitably of all, he was among the first to recognize the benefits of a canal through the Suez isthmus, eventually becoming the Austrian representative on the board of the Suez Canal Company, and its largest private shareholder. He had a villa in a suburban park, with its own chapel for his eventual burial, beside his mother; but it is his town house, designed for him by a German architect, that best expresses him, his vocation, his time and his city. Nowadays it overlooks the Piazza Venezia. When he built it the square was called Piazza, Giuseppina, in honour of the Emperor Joseph II, and outside its windows was a statue of Rear-Admiral the Archduke Maximilian, late commander of the Imperial Navy, bald but bearded and in full uniform. Franz Joseph had been present at its unveiling, and the Baron was a prominent member of its sponsoring committee, which met inside his house.
Revoltella died in the 1870s and left his house to the city, stuffed with the works of art that testified to his culture and his wealth—“handsomely fitted up,” commented Baedeker’s Austro-Hungary approvingly in 1905. It has been enlarged in recent years to incorporate Trieste’s civic gallery of modern art, but much of it is the same today as it was when he and his mother lived in it, an opulent hothouse of silks, velvets, chandeliers, tassels and gilts. It is not exactly Germanesque, it is not precisely Italian: it is in a mercantile high capitalist style that is very Triestine. Up its velvet-railed staircase, on one of Revoltella’s grand reception nights, we imagine the beau monde of Trieste sweeping with their fans and sashes, some genuinely flattered to be invited to the house of the legendary nabob, some still loftily condescending.
Clutching the catalogue which the Baron has had printed for his guests, they inspect the wonders of his affluence. They marvel (or scoff) at the emblematic sculpture, half-way up the stairs, which is called Cutting the Isthmus of Suez: this has a plaque of Ferdinand de Lesseps on one side of its plinth, and a plaque of the Khedive Abbas of Egypt on the other, and is illuminated by a red electric bulb held between the wrought-iron fangs of a snake. They admire (or deplore) the specially commissioned painting, by Trieste’s own master Cesare dell’ Acqua, entitled The Proclamation of the Free Port of Trieste and tactfully honouring the origins of all this grandeur. They wonder how many of the leather-bound books in the library have actually been read, and how often anyone has sat at its purpose-built reading-chairs, with their folding bookrests, to consult Plutarch’s Life of Alexander.
They are bemused, perhaps, by the plethora of commemorative coins, baronial crests, mementos of royal favour, images of Newton or Galileo and putatively panoramic views of the Suez Canal. They peer through the big telescope on its tripod, permanently aimed at ships in the harbour. They bow or curtsy to Signora Revoltella, who is too ancient to take part in the evening’s festivities, but has been helped down from her bedroom to greet them. They sink gratefully into the soft red-plush chairs of the saloon, and even more gratefully at last into the dining-room, its immense table laden with crested silver, Bohemian glass and china from Bavaria.
Young Helga von Krantz whispers what a waste it seems, that the Baron should be a bachelor. Her husband the general growls that he’s a lucky fellow. The Governor chats with his host over a large cigar, urging the benefits of preferential loading tariffs. Several gentlemen are huddled in a corner, deploring the effects of preferential loading tariffs. Several ladies tell the old Signora how much they admire her Modena lace collar, and she pretends to hear them. All is normal, all is stable, all feels as enduring as the empire itself. Still, a century and more later you and I may think the most revealing thing in Baron Re-voltella’s mansion is a small gilt-framed picture we spot in a corner: for when we look closer we find that it is not a picture at all, but a camera obscura set among the canvases, enabling the billionaire to keep an eye on the piazza outside, and make sure His Highness the Admiral is not vandalized on his pedestal by louts or nationalists. The Baron knows a thing or two, and does not have complete faith in those pompous old duffers the lamparetti.
THERE are many other places I like to go when I wish to sniff the imperial breezes. One is the railway station, southern terminal of the Sudbahn, which was the first of the lines connecting Vienna with Trieste. It is a building yellow, lofty and assured, in a mixture of classical and Renaissance modes that Habsburg Trieste particularly liked. Corinthian columns support its glass-panelled roof, sculpted women hold laurel-wreaths or engine-wheels, and there is any amount of floor-space for ceremonial welcomes. Silvio Benco, an eminent Trieste littérateur of the last fin de siècle, thought its architecture had “an athlete’s poise, grace and nobility,” and in his day, with its fashionable station restaurant and its hissing brass-bound locomotives, it must certainly have had confidence.
Then I like to wander around the old Central Hospital, in its day so generous an institution that poor mothers in labour were given a poverty payment—direct so to speak from the Emperor, like our donation from George VI. There is a quadrangle inside it, frequented by many cats squatting around a central image of the Virgin, and there I like to fancy the great medical men of old, taking a break in their pince-nez and white coats from the morning’s consultations. Here comes Teofilo Koepl the obstetrician, deep in the latest paper on Caesarian parturitions from Vienna, and here is Arturo Menzel the chief surgeon tapping him on the shoulder to remind him about the staff meeting that evening, and importantly ignoring them both is Dr. Antonio Carlo Lorenzetti, who has no time to chat because, as everyone knows, he is also a member of the Governor’s Council, not to mention being a Cavaliere of the Order of Franz Joseph. Patients lying on their beds in the sunshine respectfully watch them pass, and among the shrubberies the cats sit bolt upright, only their heads showing, like lemurs or prairie dogs.
The General Post Office of Trieste reminds me of the General Post Office in Sydney, Australia. Each is a telling memorial to its respective empire. Sydney’s office is buried among skyscrapers, but holds its own by sheer Victorian assurance. Trieste’s remains hugely dominant in a square of lesser institutions. Flags fly inside the Sydney building, and there are pictures of Queen Elizabeth II. In Trieste a stately carpeted staircase leads through a central salon to a bureaucratic maze of offices beyond. The post-boxes at Sydney are set in magnificent brass surrounds. At Trieste customers are provided with public lavatories and a bar. The sculptures on the outer wall at Sydney show contemporary postal services in action and were
considered indecent when they were first unveiled. The presiding frescoes at Trieste present a female Mercury surrounded by happy cherubs playing cards. The Sydney General Post Office looks out on a Cenotaph, guarded by stone sentries with bowed heads. The Palazzo delle Poste in Trieste overlooks a mammoth fountain supported by tritons, their knees made green by the dripping of the water.
And there is always the Piazza Unità, the showpiece of the city then as now. There it is easy to summon back the high times of Trieste—1897, say, when Franz Joseph was about to celebrate the golden jubilee of his rule, and the city seemed to the world at large permanently fulfilled in style and function. The Piazza was rather a different place in those days. It was called simply the Piazza. Grande, and a garden of trees almost filled its seaward side, between the palace of the Governor and the offices of Osterreichischer Lloyd, Lloyd Austriaco. The premises of the Assicurazioni Generale occupied the Palazzo Stratti, above the Caffe degli Specchi, and on their parapet a benign female figure held a protective arm over a pillar, a human bust, a painter’s palette and a railway engine, to represent Trieste guarding (for a proper premium) the interests of all the world. A tramline ran across the square, and now and then a No. 3 clanked along it. There was a bandstand in the garden; half-hidden by trees the liners of Austrian Lloyd tied up at the pier where the ferry from Greece ties up today.
Four cafés flourished in the piazza then, their summer tables almost meeting in the middle, and I prefer to hang out at the Flora, the most easy-going of them, frequented by journalists, poets, artists and such, dropping in from their homes in the Old City just out of sight. All around me first-class passengers, awaiting the time to board their ship, are enjoying their last half-hour on Austrian soil before sailing away to America, Alexandria or the east. There they sit at their tables in the sunshine, with their parasols and their ebony walking-sticks, greeting old acquaintances or introducing each other to fellow-passengers. Groups of friends fresh from Vienna or Budapest walk about the square, admiring the architecture, laughingly stepping back from the tram, the women holding up their skirts, the men often enough in the fancy uniforms of K u K. There are splashes of colour everywhere—braids and gilded epaulettes, bright silks of summer, gaudy parasols and pink fringed reticules. The music of a waltz sets people flirtatiously swaying as they chat: it sounds to me like something from Franz Lehár, and very likely is, since he is the handsomely pomaded bandmaster of the 87th Infantry who is conducting it in the bandstand.
Beyond the garden the harbour is alive. The big Lloyd liner has steam up: it’s the new Bohemia sailing today, 4,380 tons, Trieste-built and famously luxurious, with double-headed eagles on all its drawing-room furniture, including the piano. Lesser traffic jostles around the piers. Vessels of the Hungarian-Croatian Line load up for Fiume and Spalato. Small steamboats with spindly funnels sail away to Grado, Venice or down the Is-trian coast. Three-masters dry their sails in the roadsteads. Schooners from Greece or Sicily unload oranges or watermelons. Old black barges, with awnings and lines of washing, look like sampans in China, and Adriatic fishing-craft with red sails and blunt prows are painted with cabalistic symbols for luck. Sometimes a trader’s launch or a pilot boat runs out to meet an incoming vessel (“A pilot for you to Trieste?” cried the cheeky boy on Waring’s boat, but the master of that English brig had been here before—“the longshore thieves are laughing at us up their sleeves . . .”). Up the coast from the south comes a spanking warship, flying a huge imperial flag, and while the ladies at the cafes make a point of jumping in alarm when the saluting gun goes off from San Giusto, young Captain Lehar does not miss a beat.
Time to go aboard. A smart seaman in blue and white hastens around the square ringing a bell, and with handshakes and salutes gradually the crowd disperses towards the quay. A final sip of coffee (getting cold by now), a quick dash to retrieve that forgotten hatbox under the table, and the band speeds them on their way with a last lilting melody, the bandmaster bowing as he conducts when General von Krantz and his lady pass by. “Charming man,” says she. “Humph,” says the general.
THEY are only shadows, now, though, these vestiges of Habsburg Trieste, like so much in this crepuscular city. The great steam locomotives do not hiss in the station now, the Sudbahn station-master no longer welcomes important personages in his tight-buttoned livery; there is no express to Vienna any more, and when one day recently I went to see the morning train leave for Budapest I found it waiting rather pitifully at its platform—a diesel engine, two coaches, an uninviting dining car and only a handful of passengers at its windows. The mighty old hospital is still there indeed, but has long been superseded by a still mightier modern block on foothills behind the city. Only a solitary layabout was drinking in the bar of the General Post Office, when I last looked in. As for the scenes we shared in the Piazza Unita that day in 1897, I can hear the music still, but all the rest is phantom. The last passenger liner sailed long ago. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared. No tram has crossed the piazza for years. The Caffe Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct. The Governor’s Palace is now only the Palace of the Prefect and the Lloyd Austriaco headquarters, having metamorphosed into Lloyd Triestino when the Austri-ans left, are now government offices: wistfully the marble tritons blow their horns, regretfully Neptune and Mercury linger upon their entablatures. 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.
FIVE
Origins of a Civic Style
In the 1970s I once called upon Baron Rafaelle Douglas de Banfield-Tripcovich in his office at the Teatro Verdi. He was the musical director there, besides being a well-known composer. He struck me as an elegant, worldly, very gentlemanly man, dealing with his affairs in an eminently civilized way—a call from a colleague of the international opera circuit (“Of course, Maestro, see you in Paris” )—an inquiry from his secretary (“Be so good as to tell them that I may be a few moments late”)—matters of score, repertoire or musicianship—a brief exchange about party attitudes in the City Council, where he sat as an independent member. Half-way through my visit he took me over to the window surveying the bay below, and pointed out a stocky little vessel chugging across the harbour towards the mooring berths. “There goes one of my boats,” he said, for as it happened he owned all the Trieste tugs, too.
His was the heritage of an earlier Trieste, a style. Behind the pompous and entertaining fa$ade of the imperial seaport, the waltzes, the uniforms, the Revoltellas and the royal visits, there had arisen over the generations a cultivated bourgeoisie. This was the class of society which had, in my view, held the balance of civilization everywhere, tempering the arrogance of aristocracy, restraining the crudity of the masses. In Trieste it made of a working seaport one of Europe’s more lively and enlightened cities. Here it was an alliance between business and intellect, perhaps a conscious effort to raise the sights of this money-town towards higher things than profit—the Trieste poet Scipio Slataper, who was killed in the first world war, pictured his city waking up one day “between a crate of lemons and a sack of coffee beans” and suddenly realizing its lack of culture. Doubtless the same misgivings had been felt in Chicago, say, where the wealth and confidence made in steel, slaughter-houses and railroads, and the meeting of clever people from many countries, created museums and art galleries, a great university and a celebrated orchestra: or in Manchester, a hard-headed cotton capital, also full of foreigners, that supported the Hallé Orchestra and the Manchester Guardian. The governing class of Trieste in its heyday was rich and complex, and its tradition of involvement in civic affairs survives to this day.
This gives one the feeling that local people, rooted in Trieste, still run the city, in a composed way they no longer do in most cities of the western world. It is not strictly true—in Trieste today outside interests, often foreign, control many an old institution—but there are still promine
nt citizens whose lives overlap the several spheres, economic and artistic, social and political. It is a tradition here. In the 1760s the Count von Konigsbrunn was not only Trieste’s chief of police, but also its theatre director: in the 1830s Josef Ressel was not only a forester, botanist and conservationist, but also the inventor of screw propulsion for ships; in our own time there has been Baron Banfield-Tripcovich and also Ricardo Illy, Mayor of the city at the start of the twenty-first century. Illy is a lightly-built man of contemporary elegance, a style-setter who never wears a tie with his beautifully modish suits, even to the most formal of functions. He is also a highly imaginative politician. And if he looks out of his window, as the Maestro-Baron did that day, he is almost sure to see, or at least smell, signs of his own supporting fortune: Illy is one of the great coffee names of the world, and the Mayor’s family company is a mainstay of the Trieste economy.
A COLOURFUL and polyglot proletariat sustained Trieste in its boom days. Every travelling writer mentions its vivacity. The port was by far its chief employer, and men and women from many parts worked in the docks—Albanians, Turks, ear-ringed fisher-people from the Venetian lagoons, giant Montenegrins, Greeks with baggy trousers and Byronic headgear—talking and squabbling and singing in many languages, drinking in their particular taverns, living in their specific quarters of town. They ran the stalls of the city markets. They crowded the sidewalks for religious processions. They jammed the variety shows that were performed in pubs and cafés all over town, and they were exuberant celebrants of Carnival. In their varied peasant costumes, their headscarfs and gaudy waistcoats, they gave the place a constant splash of colour.