by Jan Morris
The Italians fought their war on battlefields that were often within earshot of Trieste, and under the peace treaty of Rapallo they were given their prize. The Risorgimento was completed; Trieste was redeemed. On November 3, 1918, when the Austrian administration was still functioning in the city, the destroyer Audace (1,017 tons) sailed in from Venice carrying a contingent of bersaglieri, the first troops of the Kingdom of Italy to set foot in Trieste. Watched by an exultant crowd the ship tied up at the Molo San Carlo, close to the Piazza Grande. The name of this pier commemorated both an eponymous Austrian warship that had sunk there long before, and the Austrian Emperor Charles VI who had first established the greatness of Trieste. The jubilant Italians immediately renamed it after the little warship of their success, and it has been the Molo Audace ever since.
O, THE ORGY of triumphalism that ensued, the re-naming of streets and bars and cafés, the adjustments of allusion, the revisions of loyalty! Riva Carciotti became Riva 3 Novembre. Molo Giuseppino became Molo Bersaglieri. Piazza Grande became Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia. The Caffè Flora became the Caffè Nazionale. The Porto Nuovo, which had become the Porto Vecchio, became the Porto Vittorio Emanuele III. The Verdi statue was replaced with a replica, made by its original sculptor from the metal of captured Austrian guns. From here, the City of Redemption, the vulgarly romantic adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio set off with his private army of filibusters, in cloaks, daggers and feathered hats, to seize Fiume for Italy too. And when the Fascists came to power in 1922 they cherished Trieste as a supreme national and even expansionist symbol. It was Roman. It was Italian. It was theirs by right of history and conquest, and the centuries of Habsburg rule had been no more than an interlude. Besides, as an official publication declared, “The Fascist Government is profoundly cognizant of the importance of Trieste for the economic and political expansion of Italy in the Central Danube hinterlands.”
IN FACT Trieste became just another provincial Italian city with an uncertain future, and it soon lost its old allure—James Joyce, who returned for a few months after the war, was soon disillusioned by it, and went away for good. But the Fascists adopted it as their own, and made it one of their show-places. Oberdan became, in retrospect, a Fascist as well as an irredentist hero, and his memory was carefully fostered. The Piazza Caserma was renamed Piazza Oberdan in his honour, and on the site of the barracks where he was executed a Museum of the Risorgimento was opened. It is still there, and inside it is reverently preserved the cell where Oberdan spent the last days of his life, as St. Francis’s woodland hut and Lincoln’s log cabin have been reconstructed by cultists of other kinds. In a sort of dark shrine nearby, on the exact spot of his death, a gaunt statue of the martyr is guarded by weeping angels with intersecting wings, rather as brides are attended with crossed swords at military weddings.
Mussolini’s men in Trieste were headed by a Prefect, installed in the palace of the Austrian Governors. Their first ideological purpose was to establish the ancient Italianness of the place, and remind everyone that it had been a Roman colony long before Austria had ever been heard of. Scholars quoted Dante to demonstrate that Istria, beyond Trieste, had always been the easternmost territory of Italy. Archaeologists restored the Roman amphitheatre that we glimpsed on our first day in town: in a 1930s picture of it that I have before me now a placard proclaims hugely from a nearby wall “ROMA DOMA”—which I take to signify “Rome Rules, OK?” They restored the Roman forum on the hill above, too, built a Via Capitolina up to to it and liked to recall that until the nineteenth century the hill had been popularly known as Monte Tiber. They erected a heroically Italian war memorial up there, all shields, naked torsos and fasces; they erected a catafalque commemorating the victorious Italian Third Army of the first world war, decorated with a machine-gun, a bomb, a shell, a howitzer and a dagger, together with a map marking the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum; they carefully preserved the lodogno tree by the cathedral door.
At the top of the Scala dei Giganti, the grandest of the city’s stone staircases, an immense column was erected, with a fountain playing around it, to provide the city centre with the kind of declamatory ensemble both Romans and Fascists loved. A university was opened, with a histrionic headquarters on the edge of town, and official structures of one sort and another went up opposite the amphitheatre. A start was made on a trunk road to link the centre of Trieste with the Italian national highway system. The upper part of the Canal Grande was filled in for the sake of traffic improvements. A handsome new Maritime Station, for long-haul passenger traffic, was built on the Molo Bersaglieri. The Duke of Aosta moved into Mira-mare, as commander of the local air forces, and refurnished his quarters in what was described as the Rationalist manner. And on the slopes of the northern bay, overlooking the whole city, there appeared in 1927 a monumental lighthouse. Fifty years before, this would have been supported by emblematic images of Virtue, Prosperity or even Profit: now an alarmingly androgynous figure of Victory crowned it, winged and helmeted, and to its base was affixed the anchor of the Audace.
More than all this, the Fascists brought Fascism to Trieste. This is an innately conservative city, where politicians of the Right have generally been successful, and it welcomed Mussolini’s messages. Across the city party symbols appeared, dates according to the Fascist era, buildings in the Fascist style. Within the port administration, once so proudly autonomous, a man from the Ministry of Communications in Rome could veto anything that might “compromise the interests of the State or not correspond to the government’s political directives.” Most of the city’s Austrians had willy-nilly left, but now for the first time its Slavs found themselves second-class citizens. Many Croats and Slovenes preferred to leave too, for the new kingdom of Yugoslavia; those who remained were made to feel decidedly uncomfortable. Slovene schools and newspapers were banned; use of the Slovene language was prohibited “in any public situation.” John Berger tells us (in his novel G, 1972), that when an Italian doctor was asked how patients could describe their symptoms to him if they didn’t know Italian, he replied that a cow didn’t have to explain its symptoms to a vet. . . .
This was nationalism—patriotism gone feral. The Trieste newspapers, once trenchantly outspoken, did not oppose the creeping advance of totalitarianism, and when in 1938 Mussolini himself visited the city to open new dock extensions and lay the keel of the battleship Roma (42,000 tons), the public celebrations were spectacular and unopposed. Vast panoplies of flags and banners were hoisted across the city, enormously embroidered with the word “DUCE,” or just with the letter “M” in the Napoleonic manner. “DUCE DUCE DUCE DUCE,” simply said the frontpage streamer headline in the now sycophantic Il Piccolo. Uniformed functionaries by the thousand, formidable or ridiculous, fat or weedy, paraded here and there in jackboots and tasselled hats, swelling out their chests. The Fountain of the Four Continents was moved to allow a greater welcoming crowd to assemble in the Piazza Unità (which is why it was being moved back again sixty-two years later, when I happened to be passing by that day), and when the time came the biggest audience Trieste had ever known packed the brilliantly illuminated square to hear the dictator speak. He slept only two nights in the city, but sixty years later an entire book was devoted to his visit.
It was mostly bluff and blunder. This city was not economically vital to the Italians, as it had been to the Dual Monarchy—they had several other ports all much nearer their centres of trade and production. Its industries were important enough, especially its shipyards, but for the most part its possession was a matter of nationalist symbolism. “You should have been here in the Fascist times,” said an Italian acquaintance of mine in 1946. “What a city it was then! You should have seen Mussolini in the Piazza!” But Trieste’s Fascist years (Anno I—Anno XXI) did the city little good, and for all their braggadocio never revived its prosperity, or restored it to its place in the world at large.
WORSE was to come, anyway, in the varied causes of nationalism. In the second war, Italy hav
ing changed sides again, Trieste and its neighbouring coast was annexed by the Germans. It was called the Kiistenland once more, and governed by a Gauleiter, until in 194$ two armies arrived almost simultaneously and threw the Germans out. From the west came a New Zealand division, with British armour. From the east came Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisan forces, advance warning of the huge Communist power-bloc then coming into being. The Yugoslavs arrived first, but the Germans, their last troops by then shut up in the citadel on San Giusto hill, would surrender only to the New Zealanders: when they did, a stand-off ensued between the two victorious forces, who found themselves not allies-in-arms after all, but ideological enemies.
For a few years Trieste once more entered the world’s consciousness, as the Powers argued what to do with it. No longer one of the supreme ports of Europe, it became instead one of those places, like Danzig or Tangier, that have been argued about at international conferences, written about in pamphlets, questioned about in parliamentary debates, less as living cities than as political hypotheses. Winston Churchill, in a famous speech in America, warned the world that an iron curtain had been laid across Europe, dividing democracy and Communism “from Stettin to Trieste.” Abroad the statesmen endlessly parleyed; at home the Triestini of different loyalties, chanting slogans and waving their respective flags, surged about the place rioting.
Finally in 1954 the disconsolate and bewildered seaport was given its solution, and Trieste has been what it has been ever since, a geographical and historical anomaly, Italian by sovereignty but in temperament more or less alone.
MY COUNTRY right or wrong.” How meaningless how it sounds nowadays, how preposterous! It is the slogan of blind nationalism. Patriotism, the love of one’s people or one’s country, seems to me still a noble emotion, but to my mind nationalism has come to mean no more than narrow and offensive chauvinism, based on baloney. Today you can qualify to play for the rugby team of a nation if just one of your grandparents happened to be born there, even if you have never been to the place, even if you speak no word of its language—a qualification almost as absurd as Nazi definitions of Jewishness. One day the very idea of nationality will seem as impossibly primitive as dynastic warfare or the divine right of kings; first the unification of continents, then the global rule of the almighty corporations, like institutions from space, then perhaps space itself and finally plain common-sense will reduce it to a hobby for antiquarians or re-enactment societies.
In Trieste more than anywhere the idea of nationality seems alien. The city was given its character by people from a dozen countries long ago, and is still innately solitary. It is by definition a city of the world, and I like to think it instinctively honours the playwright Saunders Lewis’s Welsh criterion of true patriotism:ysbrid hael ac o gariad at wareiddiad a thraddodiad a phethau gorau dynoliaeth—“a generous spirit of love for civilization and tradition and the best things of mankind.” Nationalist brags, envies or resentments do not become this city, and seldom surface here now: when a parade bursts out in the Piazza Unita, as it often does, with intoxicating displays of Ital-ianism, feathered hats, formation flying, military bands and warships at the quay, the citizenry responds to a great show with happy and humorous enthusiasm, but never I think with the blind conformity that greeted Mussolini in Anno XVI. A civic publicity brochure I picked up in a.d. 2000 makes no reference to nationality at all—innocent readers would not know what country the city was in, since it is simply characterized as “one of the most interesting areas in Europe.” I was encouraged, too, by a graffito I saw recently on a rubbish disposal bin in the Old City. “FUK NATIONS,” it simply said.
During my original time in Trieste I had a dear friend who was to become central to my conception of the place. Otto was a bit of a mystery. His national origins were indeterminate. He had fought bravely on our side during the war that had just ended, yet he had briefly attended the Potsdam Military Academy, and he had elderly relatives in Vienna who allowed us to spend weekends in a princely apartment there. His English was curiously thickened. He stuttered. His manner was a mixture of the florid, the stiff and the deliberately outrageous. I believe he was in some way connected to the archetypal nineteenth century adventurer Rudolf von Slatin, author of With Fire and Sword Through the Sudan, a title he loved resonantly quoting. Perhaps he was partly Jewish.
I used to tell this complex and delightful man that he was just made for inclusion in that inscrutably multi-ethnic memorial on San Giusto hill. In those days I thought of his ironically tolerant outlook as idiosyncratic cosmopolitanism, but now I would characterize it as Triesti city.
ELEVEN
Love and Lust
Italo Svevo, who was born in 1861 and died in 1928, seemed to live a prosaic life in Trieste, first as an insurance clerk, then as an executive in the family paint and varnish factory. If we are to believe his novels, though, behind the bourgeois facade of the city seethed all manner of sexual passion, as it did behind the rectitude of Victorian Britain: in one book the narrator is so addled by his own addictions and jealousies that he is giving himself a course of self-analysis, in another the city itself is interpreted as a tortuous paradigm of an infatuation.
Freud’s ideas indeed found a ready audience among the Trieste intelligentsia, confused as they must have been even then by the ambivalence of the city, its ethnic muddles and historical complexities—as Scipio Slataper wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, “everything in Trieste is double or triple.” I am confused here too, and have never felt more inclined to Freudian introspection than I am when idling the hours away in Trieste, contemplating the varied meanings of love and lust.
TAKE love first. The prime Trieste love story concerns Isabel Burton and her husband Richard, that irrepressible literary pornographer and investigator of sex. Lady Burton was a devout Catholic, and although she was permanently besotted by loving admiration for her husband, and had followed him through many of his desperate adventures, she was understandably uncomfortable with his alternative tastes and interests. After his death in Trieste she determined to obliterate a last trace of them. By then the couple had moved to an apartment in the splendid Palladian villa built by the Englishman George Hepburn 170 years before, and to this day one of the city’s best buildings. Some days after the Consul’s death, nosy passers-by looking through a window might have seen a bright fire burning in a bedroom grate, and Isabel passionately throwing papers into it—as though an enemy were at the gates, and she must destroy the consulate documents. In fact she was putting to the flames the two manuscript volumes of his unfinished final translation of The Scented Garden, said to be one of the most sensuously beautiful of all Arabic poems, with a commentary of his own rich in sexual scholarship. Burton himself said the book would be the crown of his life, but Isabel thought she could hardly do less than burn it, for the sake of Richard’s soul and reputation.
She knew very well what she was doing. She knew she would sacrifice many friendships, and infuriate the literary world, and so it proved. Algernon Swinburne, an old friend, was plainly thinking of her when he wrote, in a long poetic elegy for Burton, that
. . . Souls there are that for soul’s afright
Bow down and cower in the sun’s glad sight,
Clothed round with faith that is one with fear,
And dark with doubt of the live world’s light.
Another friend, the writer Ouida, never spoke to her again, and she was plagued by anonymous letters of abuse. But what she did, she did for love. It used to be said that she burnt the manuscript not in a bedroom grate, but in a bonfire in the garden of their house, and this is the version I prefer. The house is still there, although hemmed around by new apartment buildings, and I like to go up there in the evening and imagine the fire still ablaze beneath the trees behind—the crackle of the flames, the curling of the scorched pages one by one, and a trembling Isabel kneeling there, silhouetted against the light and muttering a prayer as she threw them into oblivion. How sad that her bonfire
that night, which she saw as a beacon of truest dedication, should have been interpreted ever since as a conflagration of betrayal.
LUST is a different matter. I don’t believe Burton was a particularly lustful man, his interest in the wide reaches of sex being mostly anthropological, or artistic. But down the hill from his house that night, lustful appetites were undoubtedly being indulged. As a great cosmopolitan seaport, Trieste in his time had a lively red-light quarter. Proust’s Narrator, who had imagined it as deliriously melancholy, changed his mind when he heard that his Albertine was enjoying Sapphic sex there, and called it an accursed city that ought to go up in flames. The centre of low life was the area around the Piazza Cavana, at the back of the Piazza Unita at the foot of the Old City. Today it is a good place for secondhand bookshops, antiques and food stores, and only a few leprous alleys resist the scours of progress. A century ago, by all accounts, its mesh of little streets was stinking, crumbling, mouldy and permanently puddled. In those days ships docked a few blocks away, and this was where the seamen caroused, the soldiers came down from their barracks and the brothels flourished. The lamparetti knew it well. Saba often picked his way through its roistering crowds on his way home in the evening, feeling that the more squalid his route, the purer his thoughts.
Prostitution was legal in Italy until 1958, some of the brothels being State-owned. It thrives in Trieste still, but there is no red-light district now; business is dispersed more discreetly across the city, arranged by mobile telephones and concluded in private houses. It was to one of the old-style places of pleasure, though, that at his own request I once escorted a fellow-officer. He was no older than I was, had never been to such a place before, and was nervous. I dropped him at the doorstep of the brothel—could it have been the famous Oriental House?—and remember still how pale he stood there in the street-light, looking back at me almost desperately as I drove my jeep away into the night.