by Jan Morris
There was also a remnant of that ancient aristocracy, the Thirteen Families, the Four Hundred of Trieste. They were called Argento, Baseggio, Bellim, Bonomo, Burlo, Cogitti, Giuliani, Leo, Padovine, Pelligrini, Petazzi, Stella and Toffani. Some still lived at their ancestral addresses in the Old City, where the grandest of them still maintained private chapels, but none of their thirteen sonorous names figure prominently in the annals of Habsburgian Trieste. The last descendant of the Giuliani family, in his youth a philosopher and scientist of repute, died in the city in 1835 all alone and forgotten, and in my imagination I see his peers flitting pale and emaciated through their shadowy lanes while the city erupts into fame around them.
Both classes are unrecognizable now, the vibrant multilingual work force, the attenuated medieval aristocracy. Behind and above them both, though, was that well-heeled business society, solid and earnest, and it flourishes still. It was drawn from many of the peoples that had created the new Trieste, and was sprinkled with nobility old and new. Like the governing classes of Chicago and Manchester, it interested itself assiduously in the arts. The city was rich in theatres and concert-halls, and nothing was too high-brow for their audiences. Ibsen, Strindberg, Wagner were all much admired in Trieste. Toscanini, Nikisch and Mahler all conducted here. One of the very first subscribers to Joyce’s bewilderingly demanding Ulysses was the Triestine Greek entrepreneur Ambrogio Ralli, who had to read the book in English, and without any of the explanatory glosses that have alone made it intelligible to most of us. The City Library, with a famous collection of books and manuscripts, was always busy; the Conservatoire of Music was never short of pupils; language schools were in great demand—even Esperanto was popular; the Università Popolare, although it was not really a university, offered public lectures that were attended by thousands of citizens. Scores of cultural institutions flourished, from the scholarly society called the Gabinetto Minerva to debating clubs and a civic madrigal society. Lloyd Adriatico took time off from the ocean trade to publish a series of classic literature. When the Trieste Yacht Works found that a debtor could not pay the bill for his boat repairs, its directors accepted an Egyptian sarcophagus instead, and passed it on to the city.
Opera was immensely popular, and the masterly beadle at the Teatro Verdi, calling up carriages in his powdered wig, was one of the city’s archetypal characters. The opera house itself was a distinguished institution, with a roster of eminent conductors. It was the first anywhere to rename itself after Verdi, and two of his works had their first performances in it (patrons preferred to forget that he didn’t bother to attend the opening night of one, Il Corsaro, and later rewrote the other, Stiffelio . . .). The business families of Trieste were fervent opera-goers. When Joyce went to a performance, to sit among the “sour reek of armpits” and “phosphorescent farts” of the upper balcony, he often saw in the stalls and boxes below bourgeois pupils of his, following the music with extreme attention: they had probably read the libretto beforehand, and very likely knew the scores too.
These were the great days of the Viennese cafés, as ubiquitous and as popular here as they were in the capital. Trieste was always a bar town, a restaurant town (though hardly a gourmet’s paradise) and especially a coffee-shop town. There had been at least one hundred licensed cafés as early as 1830, and some of them still survive—the Historic Cafés of Trieste, as the tourist people call them now. The Tommaseo, the degli Specchi, the Tergeste, the Stella Polare, the San Marco, all date from Habsburg times, and maintain the high bourgeois tradition. The most suggestive of them is the Caffè San Marco, which is where students and writers still like to drink, talk, work and show themselves off to visitors. When I enter its doors out of the noisy Via Battisti, I feel I am among just the same customers, mutatis mutandis, as would have been there a century ago: the students with their text-books spread around them, the professors reading the day’s newspapers, the odd author sucking his pen meditatively over his novel, a scattering of ladies enjoying their daily coffee-talk and one or two flaky philosophers with spectacles, sitting there hour after hour gazing at Time. If the empire still existed, an habitué once remarked to the writer Claudio Magris (as recorded in his book Microcosms), “the world would still be a Caffè San Marco, and don’t you think that’s something, if you take a look out there?”
It was a fine time and place for promenading, too. Trieste women were famously well-dressed, in local variants of Vienna fashions, and were good at showing themselves off. They loved to walk their husbands along the sea on summer evenings, or catch the tram up to the Obelisk to saunter along the ridge, or take an educational stroll around the city’s fountains, or (a favourite evening recreation) visit the extraordinary collection of oriental objets d’art that Adolf Wünsch from Moravia displayed above his pasticceria on the Corso. Families would spend a day picnicking in the hill-side park that Baron Revoltella had bequeathed to the city, where the grown-ups could pay their respects to the magnate and his mother, safe in their tombs in their private chapel, while the children could play for hours with the turtles in the pool outside.
THE LEGACIES of this society are still inescapable in Trieste. The families may be extinct, but many of their names are still part of the civic vocabulary, and sometimes their memories live. “Who’s that?” I asked the man behind the counter at the Cosulich Travel Agency on the Via Rossini, pointing to a photograph of a prosperous-looking gentleman on the wall behind his back. “That’s one of the bosses,” he said—and he was referring to the Cosulich brothers, shipowners who died generations before he was born.
One can still follow the trails of those happy promenades. Revoltella’s chapel reminds me of one of those memorial churches that Russians used to erect on battlefields in the days of the Czars, and the turtles are still a delight. The Opicina tram still braves the 26 percent gradient up to the Obelisk, shoved along in the steepest part by a funicular engine. Even a tour of the city fountains can still be fun. Like most such nineteenth-century merchant cities Trieste was lavishly ornamented with civic fountains, but their careers have been precarious because they have constantly been moved as times or tastes have demanded. One year they are spouting in the Piazza della Borsa, the next they are in the Piazza Venezia—I once chanced to see a mobile crane in the very act of lifting the mountainous centre-piece of the Fountain of the Four Continents, to shift it from one spot to another in the Piazza Unità. The one symbolical fountain-figure that can feel reasonably safe is the little putto in the Piazza Ponterosso, beside the Canal Grande: but then Giovannini del Ponterosso has been there since 1753, before bourgeois Trieste existed, and he has long been so beloved among Triestini of all classes that his tenure seems secure.
Most of the civic statuary proudly commemorates the old bourgeoisie, and properly represents its values. My own tastes run to swagger in public monuments—a few admirals and equestrian generals, a duke or two, soldiers indomitable in life, magnificent in death. Habsburg Trieste was not a swaggering city, though, and its Valhalla is reserved for worthies, preferably respectable and responsible citizens of art or learning. Its earthly annexe is the Public Garden at the top of the Via Cesare Battisti, whose gates are guarded by the grandest worthy of them all. Domenico Rossetti, who died in 1842, was of aristocratic origin actually, but as journalist, scholar, historian, humanist, antiquarian and public benefactor he became the great champion of the bourgeois civilization in Trieste. He gave valuable books to the City Library, he founded the Gabinetto Minerva, he financed the tree-shaded boulevard now called Viale XX Settembre, which is still a pleasant place to sit on a hot day and write a philological thesis. Near the top of it is the Politeama Rossetti, one of the city’s two main theatres, and Rossetti himself stands in bronze sentinel over the main gate of the nearby garden. There he is, complacent on his pedestal with a cloak romantically over his shoulders and a forefinger keeping his place in a book, while clambering about his plinth, and flying over it, nymphs or graces reach out to him with olive branches and a flaming
torch.
Sheltering behind this high priest of the culture are less executive acolytes. There are twenty-one of them, writers, artists, educators, scientists, musicians, each with his own portrait bust beneath the trees. Most of them are known only in Trieste, a few are internationally famous, but they all stand there, spattered by pigeons, attended by many cats, serenaded by ducks from the duck-pond, with an air of grave dependability. Even Joyce, the one outsider among them, is somehow admitted to the Establishment by the provision of a bronze picture-frame around his head.
ALL IN all Habsburg Trieste was a complete and interesting city, and its citizens were proud of it. Theirs was an age of burgeoning, confident municipalities throughout the industrialized world, with strong municipal governments that made some of them almost city-states. In Trieste the degree of autonomy achieved long before was transmuted into something called municipalismo, a conscious sense of separateness that still exists. This was an innovative, technological place, not hampered by nostalgia, and like the Chicagos and the Manchesters it looked eagerly to the future. Its young intellectuals were much taken with the ideas of the Futurist Filippo Marinetti, who believed in a fresh start for everything, artistically, politically, socially, historically. Marinetti in return thought of Trieste as an ideal model for his explosive theories, and called it la nostra bella polveriera, “our beautiful powder-magazine.” In 1910 a great Futurist meeting was held in the Politeama Rossetti, and half the local intelligentsia attended it. Most of them thought Marinetti went rather too far in demanding the burning of libraries and the flooding of museums, but nevertheless he was right in judging this a society by no means shackled in tradition.
Trieste had its own language, and this helped to heighten the sense of civic completeness. Triestino was descended from the Venetian dialect, and was similarly rich in slur and sibilant, but it had absorbed words and idioms from the many other languages of this municipal melting-pot (sonababic meant “son-of-a-bitch”). It was not simply a lingua franca of the uneducated, but was commonly used by people of all ranks and resources, in many subtle inflexions—even the Austrians had their own version of it, known as Austriacans. Poetry was written in it, speeches were made in it, and to understand it was a mark of civic membership (James Joyce was fluent, and apparently made use of it in the neo-language of Finnegans Wake).
The dialect lives on, and so does the familial kind of civic identity. Educated, respectable middle-class citizens still set the style of Trieste, and mould much of its life in their own image. Remember those comfortable rentiers and professionals we saw at their victuals on our first evening in Trieste? I may have been wrong about them, for when I dined there on another evening a table-full of citizens just as respectable, just as discreet, turned out to be writers one and all. Conversely I may be wrong about the customers at the Caffè San Marco too—those professors are probably company accountants really, the novelist is preparing a computer programme and the sages are not contemplating Time, but waiting for the football on TV. With this superficial homogenization goes a more real general pride in the city, and interest in it. Hundreds turn out when they are asked to help clean up the city streets. Books and pamphlets about Trieste pour from the local presses: one published in 1999 contained a local general knowledge quiz, asking for instance who was represented in the marble sculpture in the atrium of the Revoltella Museum (the nymph Aurisina), and how many ice-cream parlours there were in the Viale XX Settembre (five).
By contemporary European standards this is still a calm and self-controlled city. It is one of the few big commercial centres of the continent that was not half-destroyed during the second world war, and in many ways its nineteenth-century moderation has survived. I happened to be sitting on a bench one day when a Chinese man had a heart attack on the seat next door. His wife was distraught, but the responses of passers-by were steady. One man gently laid the poor fellow out on the bench, and propped up his head with a rucksack. Another comforted the weeping wife. A third ran off to call the emergency services, and in a matter of moments, with a minimum of fuss, a woman doctor and two stalwart para-medics arrived to whisk the man away to hospital. “Who must I pay?” asked the wife helplessly. “Nobody, Madame,” she was proudly told, “it is a service of our city.”
Can it all last? Young people tell me they find the civic ethos oppressive. Others say it is being whittled away by the influx of migrants from Italy, who bring with them what one informant defined for me as caosmismo, chaoticness. Certainly the Trieste bourgeoisie seems to get older every year. Watch its representatives, any fine summer day, going down for their morning dalliances at the outdoor cafes beside the Canal Grande, with their sticks and spectacles and sunhats and little dogs on leads, and you may well think them a dying caste. I once came across a open-air concert in the Piazza della Borsa where a few hundred of them had assembled. From the waterfront there sounded, on the evening air, the thump of a rap band, but in the piazza all was fond sentimentality. The performer was a well-known Trieste artist called Umber to Lupi, who sang songs in the Trieste dialect. He was of a certain age himself, and he sat at his keyboard altogether relaxed, in shirt and slacks and anorak, while before him his elderly audience responded as they might to a family friend. They knew him well, and he knew them. As he sang they sang with him, laughed with him, swayed and tapped their feet as he did.
They were singing their own songs, in their own language, out of their own past. I noticed that some of their eyes were full of tears, and I almost wept a little myself: because of their age, because of mine, because of the hard times they had lived through, because Signor Lupi was a true professional, because of the sweet songs, because I feared that nobody would be singing them much longer, because of the decline of the bour-geosie across the world, and because—well, because of the Trieste effect.
TO CELEBRATE the start of the third millennium the whole of the Piazza Unità, the largest square in Italy, was officially painted over with an enormous picture to mark Trieste’s place in Europe. It showed a brave young woman, blond hair flying, riding a bull towards the open sea, with a sun and a moon above, and seven stars against an azure sky. Hundreds of citizens, young and old, had helped to spread its four tons of blue, yellow, red and white paint over the surface of the square, and they had been encouraged to add a thousand slogans and messages of their own, so that the whole was like the biggest graffito ever scrawled. Nobody could see all of it, except from a helicopter, and people wandered the piazza all day long, exploring the different corners of this communal signature.
The Irish-Triestine scholar John McCourt (to whose book The Years of Bloom I am much indebted) has likened the Trieste dialect to “a living encyclopedia of the cultures, nations and languages that had been assimilated by the city.” In the same way I thought the millennium painting in the Piazza Unità a proper index of the city’s character (and I considered it only proper, too, in a city of intelligent dialectic, that the management of the Caffè degli Specchi, which was obliged to close its doors during the months it took to clean everything off and resurface the square, should have declared the whole project just another example of The Arrogance of Power).
SIX
Sad Questions of Oneself
On July 2, 1914, the 22,000-ton battleship SMS Viribus Unitis arrived at the Molo San Carlo in Trieste bringing the corpses of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir to the Emperor, and his wife, Sophie. They had both been assassinated at Sarajevo, in the Austrian territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, five days before.
Their coffins were carried in funeral procession through the streets of Trieste, before being sent by train to Vienna. This was an imperial frisson of an altogether new kind, and I can sense the shock of the occasion from an old photograph I have before me now. Sailors line the street, imperial infantrymen escort the cortège, led by mounted officers with cockaded hats. Every window and balcony, attic to ground floor, is crowded with people. Black flags or carpets hang from walls and flagstaffs. A mass of citiz
enry fills the pavements, the women in dark clothes, the men removing from their heads the boaters which every self-respecting male wore in summer Trieste. The photograph was taken by the local photographers Giuseppe and Carlo Wulz, whose very names give it a true Trieste evocation.
At the moment they clicked their shutter the procession has momentarily halted in the Corso, the main street of the city, now the Corso Italia. There is no apparent reason. Everybody in the crowd, from every window, is looking towards the coffins. The soldiers are rigid. The officers have turned in their saddles to see what is happening. Beside the bier a solitary courtier stands motionless, his top hat in his hand. Soldiers, sailors, citizens, officials, all wait still, silent and expectant. Did some of them guess that the saddest of angel messengers was passing by, foretelling the world’s tragedy, the empire’s humiliation, and their own proud city’s long decline?
IT WAS when those bodies returned from Sarajevo, I suppose, that tristesse was decreed for Trieste, but long before then melancholy had found its proper image here. Miramar contains its very essence. It stands on its promontory weeping, and to my eyes even in the sunshine its walls are never sparkling. A pleasant park surrounds it, and its rooms are full of treasures, but nobody who goes there can fail to sense its numen of regret.
Maximilian, having ably reformed the Austrian Navy, retired from the sea in 1856, but he did not get on well with his elder brother the Emperor, and was happy to live well away from Vienna with his devoted young bride. He was a dreamy sort of man, somewhat liberal in his views and much influenced by his uncle the crazed romantic Ludwig I of Bavaria, so he was not at ease with the stiff autocracy of K u K. He was actually removed from a post as Governor-General of Lombardy as being too progressive (and a good thing too, perhaps, for he wanted to plant the Piazza San Marco at Venice with orange trees, and turn its campanile into a lighthouse).