by Jan Morris
They are gone, all those great vessels, gone with the old greatness of Trieste itself. They had sad ends. The Viribus Unitis was meanly sunk that day at Pola—meanly, because she had already been handed over by the defeated Austro-Hungarian Navy to the new Yugoslav Kingdom, a possible rival to Italian pretensions in the Adriatic. The Roma was vindictively sunk by a German glider bomb in 1943, when the Italians had already signed their armistice with the western allies, and she was on her way to surrender to the British. As to the two magnificent liners, I mourned them in death as I had admired them in life. Conte de Savoia I saw for myself at last, after so many years of fancy, sunk, scarred and rusty in shallow water off Venice. Rex was lying burnt-out on her side, like a rotting and scabrous whale, when for the first time in my life I looked out from Trieste towards the coast of Istria.
EVEN in its prime there were signs of the city’s vulnerability. It was a one-purpose town, and seers recognized even then that it could easily be ruined. But it held on until the first world war. Until that catastrophe shippers the world over still preferred to send their goods Via Trieste, and the tall-funnelled steamers of Lloyd Austriaco were still to be seen basking on advertising posters, surrounded by sampans in exotic harbours, while passengers with parasols daintily disembarked. But the collapse of K u K meant that the city had lost its occupation. There was no money in its grand old banks: all their deposits had been removed to Vienna at the start of the war, and Milan’s Corriere della Sera likened the city in 1919 to a millionaire who had lost his safe, and was left to languish in poverty.
Handed over to Italy, Trieste had no organic purpose. It was not needed. Venice, Naples and Genoa were all well-developed ports. Trieste’s trade with central Europe calamitously declined, and it was like a last skewed demonstration of old functions when in 1920 shiploads of soldiers of the legendary Czech Legion arrived from Russia. Technically they were deserters from the old imperial army, but they were packed off in trains, like so many cargoes before them, into the heart of the disintegrated empire, where they were welcomed as patriotic heroes.
Only passenger traffic saved the port from ignominy, because from the quays beside the Piazza Unita liners did still sail across the world. Two 24,000-ton motorships of the Cosulich Line, Vulcania and Saturnia, maintained an Atlantic service, and the ships of Lloyd Triestino were busy too. Now many of their passengers were emigrants, and most of them were Jews. Thousands of disillusioned citizens of central Europe took passage to the United States of America, by the route that had so long been habitual to the old empire. Thousands more left the shtetls of Russia and Poland to look for their new Zion in Palestine. Those posters of sunburnt tourists in the east gave way to pictures of open-necked young pioneers making for the kibbutzim, beneath fiery slogans in Hebrew. Elderly vessels were mostly used for the trade, and they were like mirror images of those desperate old ferries one later saw being turned away from the beaches of Palestine: loaded not with despairing souls of exodus, but with emigrants full of hope. The business was profitable for Lloyd Triestino, which made its own direct arrangements with the Zionist movement, until the Fascist Government instructed the company “not to pay too much attention to the Jewish trade”; and Adolf Hitler doubtless watched with approval, for he had told the nations of the world that they were welcome to all the German Jews they liked, “even if they went there in luxurious ships . . .”
The Fascists, looking for purposes for their City of Redemption, hoped to make Trieste an exhibition of Italian modernity—like the Futurists, in their old dreams of fire, smoke and energy. For one thing they saw it as a centre of aviation. It had long been connected with flying. It was a military air base in the first world war, and several aircraft had been designed and built there. In 1926 a local company started operating flying-boats on regular services to Venice and Pola, with headquarters in a shed on the waterfront. In the 1930s this was replaced by a proper Maritime Air Station, boldly on the foreshore and conveniently near the Hotel de la Ville. It still exists, converted now to other uses (Port Captain’s office, Coastguard base, occasional concert venue) but still recognizably of its time and ideology—at its corners two very Fascist demi-torsos, male and female, strain themselves heroically towards Cielo Nostrum. I have in my hand now a modernistic catalogue cover from 1934 (Anno XII) which shows the Trieste waterfront as the Fascists liked to think of it. Stylized freighters line the piers before and behind; a sleek three-funnelled destroyer is at the Molo Audace; either Vulcania or Saturnia lies stately at the ocean passenger terminal; and among them all there sweeps towards its white station, leaving a plume of spray behind it, a streamlined black seaplane.
Mussolini’s Government also imagined Trieste as an imperial port once more. From here, they resolved, a re-born Italy would exert its power abroad. In 1935 the Italians invaded Ethiopia, intending to combine it with their existing colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland to create a great new empire in east Africa. Here was a purpose for which Trieste, “third entry to the Suez Canal,” was better fitted than any other Italian port, and the Ministry of Public Works announced that the city had been “destined for imperial functions by the Duce.” The port’s own commissioner said Trieste would be the pivot of an undertaking that would “open up a new epoch in the history of national expansion, and in the colonial history of the world.” Tanks, guns and aircraft became the port’s chief commodity then, and its ships carried the pith-helmeted New Italians who were to colonize the new empire—“armed emigrants of the Dark Continent,” the port commissioner called them.
Some of the rifles that were then sent to Africa, captured by the British a few years later, ended up as drill weapons for the Officers’ Training Corps at my school in Britain. They seemed to me more like muskets than rifles, but I dare say some of them were presented in salute when Mussolini came to inspect the port in 1938. By then, although an invasion of Albania was still to come, it was really too late for imperial destiny. It was Anno XVI of the Fascist era, but before Anno XXI arrived the Italian empire was dissolved, Mussolini had been hanged from a lamppost and Trieste had lost its purpose once again. On the central waterfront at Trieste today, the chief reminders of those years are a liner terminal without liners, an air station without aircraft, the Saturnia rowing club and the Ristorante Vulcania.
THE NAZIS found no real use for Trieste. Their brief empire was doomed too, and it was their final annexation. When the Italians deserted them in 1943, and they declared Trieste an integral part of the Reich, they thought of it as a bulwark against the threat of Slav untermenschen from the east—a last bastion of civilization, as Metternich had declared it long before. Their local newspaper, Deutsche Adria Zeitung, forecast that it would know splendid times again, revived by “the European idea,” but in the event almost the only use the Germans found for the port was the transport of coal and bauxite up the coast from Is-tria. The British and Americans did no better either, during their period of governance. The British used Trieste as the terminal of the trans-continental route by which they transported troops to their own fading empire in the Middle East, but in general both Powers were more concerned about who Trieste should belong to than what it was for.
The place just struggled on, when once Trieste’s post-war status was settled, and the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s did briefly restore to the city some of its original functions. Eastern and western Europe were then divided into rigidly discrete blocs. The west boomed with capitalist progress, the east skulked in dogma. One country stood half-apart from this stagnant conflict: the Federation of Yugoslavia, which was ruled by Communists indeed, but had declared its emancipation from Stalin’s Soviet Union, and which thus occupied an equivocal half-way position between east and west. Trading with the west, or even travelling there, was harshly regulated within the Soviet-dominated States, but people could go relatively easily into Yugoslavia. It became a sort of de-pressurising chamber, a rat-run through the Iron Curtain, and from Yugoslavia entrepreneurs could easily reach the easternmost o
utpost of the materialist civilization, Trieste.
The city responded, and became an international emporium once more. For some years it was a murky exchange for the commodities most coveted in the deprived societies of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia itself. Jeans, for example, were then almost a currency of their own, so terrific was the demand on the other side of the line, and the trestle tables of the Ponterosso market groaned with blue denims of dubious origin (“Jeans Best for Hammering, Pressing and Screwing,” said a label I once noticed). There was a thriving traffic in everything profitably re-sellable, smuggleable or black-marketable—currencies, stamps, electronics, gold. Not far from the Ponterosso market was Darwil’s, a five-story jeweller’s famous among gold speculators throughout central Europe. Dazzling were its lights, deafening was its rock music, and through its blinding salons clutches of thick-set conspiratorial men muttered and wandered, inspecting lockets through eye-glasses, stashing away watches in suit-cases, or coldly watching the weighing of gold chains in infinitesimal scales.
After the fall of Communism in eastern Europe, but before the re-emergence of the market economy there, all this half-clandestine trade briefly mutated into a legitimate Balkan market, in the gardens opposite the railway station where Nora had waited for Jim. Thousands of Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs came in buses to shop there. They used to seem to me like looters of a despoiling army, except that in those early years of Europe’s re-awakening they were shabby and diffident, were slung about with carrier bags, and were in search not of masterpieces, but of cooking utensils, anoraks, shoes, suitcases, toys and household gimmicks. The market had a gypsy air to it, and its wares were often picaresque. I was amused one morning to see a substantial housewife inspecting a line of sports luggage designed, so a sales leaflet said, “For Who Live Within One’s Opinion For Our Own Adventure Instinct To Walk Around Metropolitan Jungle For Ever.” What could such a slogan mean? I asked her. But she did not reply, perhaps because she only talked Ruthenian.
IN THE evening the shoppers boarded their dingy buses for the journey home. Every cranny, locker and cupboard was stuffed with acquisitions—packages dangled from roofs, boxes were stuck under seats, carrier bags were piled in the aisles and every child played with a bleeping space man. From the windows satisfied exhausted faces peered out through the cigarette smoke. I once buttonholed an elderly Hungarian, carefully writing a picture postcard as he waited to board his bus, and asked him how he had enjoyed his trip to Trieste. He said it was an experience of nostalgia—by which I prefer to think he meant, if only in folk-memory as it were, that it had been like an outing in the old times, when the zithers played on the lurching wagons and the peasant girls danced in their embroidered aprons.
But these encounters would soon be nostalgic for Trieste too. Before long people could buy their electric kettles, T-shirts and remote-controlled computer games just as well in Sofia, Bucharest or Bratislava, and the emporium fizzled out again. The Balkan bazaar was no more, the garden opposite the railway station was re-developed, and all that remained was a respectable covered market like any other. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century nothing came to much in Trieste. One after the other, regimes and ideologies and changing circumstances had all failed to restore its old virility. It was as though that redundant specialist of mine, during a very, very long retirement, were now and then to try starting some new activity altogether, growing mushrooms or playing the stock exchange, only to find that his cellar was too warm for fungi, and the Dow Jones had collapsed around him.
FIFTEEN
After My Time
Anthropomorphising cities like this is generally a foolish practice, but so particularly fond and proud of their town are the citizens of Trieste that it often feels as though it really does possess a communal will of its own. At the start of the twenty-first century something remarkable happened to its spirit. It was as though it had been given a course of Viagra, and rediscovered its lost vigour at last—a civic virility that has come too late for me, and can only be fulfilled after my time.
What had happened? Perhaps it was Ricardo lily’s confident administration, which encouraged the city to look outwards once again, instead of permanently pondering its own disabilities. Perhaps it was the advent of a new Europe, which seemed to offer Trieste a revival of old opportunities. Perhaps it was the energizing spread of globalization. Perhaps it was a general feeling that Trieste could prosper best by being entirely itself, a city unique in geography as in history: “FUK NATIONS,” said that graffito on the refuse bin, back on page 133, and perhaps the old place had reached the same conclusion for itself. Or perhaps, like a sheep farmer facing ruin in Wales, it simply realized in its civic heart that the only sensible alternative was diversification. It could no longer have one purpose: it must have many.
IT MAINTAIN S its oldest functions. It is still a sort of capital, and four authorities have their seat here. A Prefect represents the sovereignty of Rome, like the empire’s Governor long ago, and in the same palace. A Mayor runs the city from his offices below Michel and Japhez. One President heads the Provincial Government of Trieste, from his headquarters around the square from the General Post Office; another, established in the old Lloyd Triestino palace in the Piazza Unita, presides over the Autonomous Region of Friuli- Venezia Giulia.
Trieste is still an important great insurance centre, and of course it is still a port—no longer one of the world’s great ports, but still the fifth port of the Mediterranean. Lloyd Triestino belongs to Taiwanese owners now, but a few of its container ships still sail from Trieste to places like Jeddah, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, which have known the house flag for generations: the successor to its palatial old headquarters of the Piazza Unita, the one with Mercury and Neptune on its balustrade, is a glittering glass palace almost overlooking its original Arsenal, the one with the cardboard tower and the lions. Most of the ships come and go from Muggia bay now, but the ferry from Greece still sails from the Molo Bersaglieri, and the Albanian ferry docks at the Old Port that Francis Joseph opened long ago. If there are no great liners or warships on the stocks of Trieste, there is generally a glittering cruise ship having a refit in the very same shipyards.
The port of Trieste still has a customs-free zone, last remnant of the Free Port that Charles VI decreed, and it has revived some old links with the European interior. A mile or two up the bay from the shipyards a long thin jetty protrudes into the sea, and moored at it are generally a couple of tankers. They are pumping oil ashore from the Middle East, as the freighters of the old Trieste unloaded their Egyptian cotton and their Damascene silks upon the piers around the promontory: and just as those old staples of the entrepot found their way by road or railway over the Karst to central Europe, so the tankers’ oil travels by trans-alpine pipeline far into the European interior, to be turned into gasoline by refineries in Austria, in the Czech Republic or at Ingolstadt in the heart of Bavaria.
Another tradition of the port robustly survives, too. Down among the industrial clutter of the docks you may detect a magnificent smell in the air—only a hint to begin with, only a suggestion, until gradually a rich aroma presents itself which, sniffing like a bloodhound, you may trace to a particular installation somewhere around Pier 7. It is a classic fragrance of Trieste: the smell of coffee. It pervaded the streets of the city in its prime, in the days when coffee was kept in huge barrels outside every cafe, and this aromatic dock building is still Europe’s No. 1 warehouse of the coffee trade. Coffee from around the world arrives here, and is distributed across all Europe—or processed by Signor lily’s people and sent back across the seas again.
TOURISM is the first alternative that suggests itself, when diversification is needed—even the Welsh farmer immediately thinks of caravan parks. Joyce liked the fact that Trieste was in no sense a tourist city, unlike Rome, which suggested to him a man making a living by exhibiting the corpse of his grandfather. Fortunately Triest
e can never become one of your centres of mass tourism, crassly subjecting its true nature to the satisfaction of its visitors. It has no sandy beaches and few great sights: package tourists will always do better in Venice, or in the seaside resorts of Dalmatia. Nevertheless at the start of a new century Trieste is self-consciously sprucing itself up for visitors. Streets have been pedestrianized, piazzas resurfaced, roads re-aligned, museums modernized, tracks laid for a magnetic tram service. In the summer one outdoor festival succeeds the next—sand was especially brought in, in 2000, for the Beach City World Volley-Ball Tournament on the waterfront—and the nostalgic songs of Signor Lupi compete with the beat of rock groups from the hangar of the Maritime Air Station.
I once dropped in upon a meeting of tourist developers at Muggia, the Venetian port which is now part of Trieste province, and asked one of them what he thought they could do with the little place. “Do with it?” he cried. “Do with it? It is a Portofino waiting to be discovered!”—and he had a point, for it does have all the prerequisites, a picturesque harbour filled with boats, quaint backstreets, an exquisite piazza, a castle elegantly positioned on the hill above. I have twice given myself lunch at the Trattoria Risorto, by the harbour, and each time the Mayor of Muggia has been lunching there too, deep in discussion with business folk, and envisaging, I would guess, the Portofinization of his fief.
Then there is cultural tourism. With its university and its ever-enterprising publishers, Trieste has never been slow to capitalize upon its past. Books about itself come in a steady stream from its presses, to pile up on booksellers’ tables and congest the shelves of my own library. There has always been Winckelmann, of course, and lately the shrewd Trieste publicists have realized the universal appeal of a lost monarchy. Now that the passions of Italianity have faded somewhat they are exploiting the Habsburgs for all they are worth. Miramare is the chief single tourist attraction of Trieste, and now it is supplemented by sundry Habsburgian allusions. Maximilian himself has been elevated almost to the status of a myth—“That was a gift from Maximilian” I once heard a guide sanctimoniously telling a group in the cathedral, pointing to a chandelier as though it were a sacred relic. Much is made of imperial influences upon the Trieste cuisine, in tortes and strudels and a luncheon snack called the rebechin, involving things like pork, tripe, goulash, sausages and Prague ham. The operetta festival at the Teatro Verdi has become a decidedly imperial event: audiences rise to their feet not only for the Italian national anthem, but also for the Radetzky March. Sissy is back near the railway station, where the Balkan market was, postcards of the Father of his People are on sale in souvenir stalls, the old coffee-shops are promoted as Historic Cafes and Trieste’s writers of the Habsburgian years are celebrated as they never were in the days when they had trouble finding publishers for their books.