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Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
Jan Morris has crafted a meditation on a most unusual city. James (as she was then) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the end of World War II. Since then, the city has come to represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories.
194 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2001
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3934 people want to read
About the author
Jan Morris
164 books468 followersJan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture.
In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. In 1972, she had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco. Sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou did the surgery, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and later got a civil union. On May, 14th, 2008, Morris and Tuckniss remarried each other. Morris lived mostly in Wales, where her parents were from.
In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. In 1972, she had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco. Sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou did the surgery, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and later got a civil union. On May, 14th, 2008, Morris and Tuckniss remarried each other. Morris lived mostly in Wales, where her parents were from.
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September 2, 2025
Morris discreetly projects his own story in this city, where the definition of self is somewhat circumvented. At the end of the Second World War, he came to Trieste for the first time as a man, a soldier of the British Empire. She returned as a female journalist, a little wary of this notion of empire and this nostalgia. This nostalgia is probably why, if the book is imbued with melancholy, it opens on the future by announcing possible evolutions of the city (it is a welcome chapter).
January 12, 2019
Trieste, Jan Morris begins, is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination. It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name that everyone knows. It is a middle-sized, essentially middle-aged Italian seaport, ethnically ambivalent, historically confused, only intermittently prosperous, tucked away at the top right-hand corner of the Adriatic Sea, and so lacking the customary characteristics of Italy that in 1990 some 70 percent of Italians, so a poll claimed to discover, did not know it was in Italy at all.
Perhaps the inexorable problem with Trieste is its location:
You can see it up there, tucked right where Morris said it was. There's no denying it has a great view of Venice, but take a closer look:
Awkward, that, like one country came and took a slice of another country, and valuable sea access land no less. We've seen this causus belli before.
But, once upon a time, Trieste was Italian, yes, but also a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A dual monarchy they called it. That changed after the First World War when Italy scooped it up. Suddenly, dudes with names like Kogut became Cogetti.
Ettore Schmitz got the message and when he began publishing his novels he did so under the nom de plume Italo Svevo. He became chums with James Joyce who became something of an expatriate in Trieste, no doubt enjoying the extended drinking hours. It was there that Joyce wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and also where he heard an odd admixture of language (sonababic meant son-of-a-bitch) that he absorbed and which served as the template language of Finnegan's Wake. In some ways it seems to me that Joyce and Trieste were made for each other, Morris writes.
It was in Trieste that Freud studied the sexual organs of eels. Proust did not get out of his bed to visit, but he nevertheless used Trieste. His Narrator, who imagined it as deliciously melancholy, changed his mind when he heard his Albertine was enjoying Sapphic sex there, and called it an accursed city that ought to go up in flames.
Egon Schiele was there for a bit then went back home to Vienna and immediately painted this self-portrait:
The Nazis, Morris writes, found no real use for Trieste. They annexed it anyway when the Italians quit and used it for their ongoing foul purpose (more on that later). When the Americans and Brits picked it up during their period of governance, they were more concerned about who Trieste should belong to than what it was for.
When Churchill got specific in his "Iron Curtain" speech, he said that line dividing democracy and Communism stretched from Stettin to Trieste.
Well, that's enough name-dropping.
What use, then, does Morris make of this place she calls nowhere, where a country was once one thing and then another, and its people too? Here's a sampling:
-- I began to see the idea of the nation-state in a new light. I already knew what Dr. Johnson's saw, about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. Now I glimpsed the fateful nonsense of nationalism, for which so many of my generation, and my father's too, had fought and died.
and:
-- If race is a fraud, as I often think in Trieste, then nationality is a cruel pretence. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of this place shows, it is disposable. You can change your nationality by the stroke of a notary's pen; you can enjoy two nationalities at the same time or find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. In one of his books Joseph Conrad (né Korzeniowski), knowing how artificial nationality was, likened it to "an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence." It is not usually racial prejudice that incites hooligans to bash each other in football stadiums, but particularly accomplished convictions of nationhood. The false passion of the nation-state made my conceptual Europe no more than a chimera: and because of nationality the city around me that day, far from being a member of some mighty ideal whole, was debilitated in loneliness.
So, this book about nowhere.
----- ----- ----- ---- -----
My reading is often serendipitous, and none the poorer for it. The reading gods have been kind. But sometimes I plan. I came to Jan Morris late in life and am quite smitten. She's very old but still alive, last I checked. She wrote that this would be her last book, but she lied. Just a little bit.
In any event, I've decided to read one of her books every year, maybe as a hope for an extension of my life. This is asking a lot of someone known for his obsessions.
But, more than that, I picked this one of Morris's books because there's another book about Trieste lurking on my TBR shelves. And so, back-to-back.
I wrote above that those Nazis might pop up again. And so they will. But . . .
. . . to be continued . . .
COMING SOON, in a review to you: Trieste.
Perhaps the inexorable problem with Trieste is its location:
You can see it up there, tucked right where Morris said it was. There's no denying it has a great view of Venice, but take a closer look:
Awkward, that, like one country came and took a slice of another country, and valuable sea access land no less. We've seen this causus belli before.
But, once upon a time, Trieste was Italian, yes, but also a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A dual monarchy they called it. That changed after the First World War when Italy scooped it up. Suddenly, dudes with names like Kogut became Cogetti.
Ettore Schmitz got the message and when he began publishing his novels he did so under the nom de plume Italo Svevo. He became chums with James Joyce who became something of an expatriate in Trieste, no doubt enjoying the extended drinking hours. It was there that Joyce wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and also where he heard an odd admixture of language (sonababic meant son-of-a-bitch) that he absorbed and which served as the template language of Finnegan's Wake. In some ways it seems to me that Joyce and Trieste were made for each other, Morris writes.
It was in Trieste that Freud studied the sexual organs of eels. Proust did not get out of his bed to visit, but he nevertheless used Trieste. His Narrator, who imagined it as deliciously melancholy, changed his mind when he heard his Albertine was enjoying Sapphic sex there, and called it an accursed city that ought to go up in flames.
Egon Schiele was there for a bit then went back home to Vienna and immediately painted this self-portrait:
The Nazis, Morris writes, found no real use for Trieste. They annexed it anyway when the Italians quit and used it for their ongoing foul purpose (more on that later). When the Americans and Brits picked it up during their period of governance, they were more concerned about who Trieste should belong to than what it was for.
When Churchill got specific in his "Iron Curtain" speech, he said that line dividing democracy and Communism stretched from Stettin to Trieste.
Well, that's enough name-dropping.
What use, then, does Morris make of this place she calls nowhere, where a country was once one thing and then another, and its people too? Here's a sampling:
-- I began to see the idea of the nation-state in a new light. I already knew what Dr. Johnson's saw, about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. Now I glimpsed the fateful nonsense of nationalism, for which so many of my generation, and my father's too, had fought and died.
and:
-- If race is a fraud, as I often think in Trieste, then nationality is a cruel pretence. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of this place shows, it is disposable. You can change your nationality by the stroke of a notary's pen; you can enjoy two nationalities at the same time or find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. In one of his books Joseph Conrad (né Korzeniowski), knowing how artificial nationality was, likened it to "an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence." It is not usually racial prejudice that incites hooligans to bash each other in football stadiums, but particularly accomplished convictions of nationhood. The false passion of the nation-state made my conceptual Europe no more than a chimera: and because of nationality the city around me that day, far from being a member of some mighty ideal whole, was debilitated in loneliness.
So, this book about nowhere.
----- ----- ----- ---- -----
My reading is often serendipitous, and none the poorer for it. The reading gods have been kind. But sometimes I plan. I came to Jan Morris late in life and am quite smitten. She's very old but still alive, last I checked. She wrote that this would be her last book, but she lied. Just a little bit.
In any event, I've decided to read one of her books every year, maybe as a hope for an extension of my life. This is asking a lot of someone known for his obsessions.
But, more than that, I picked this one of Morris's books because there's another book about Trieste lurking on my TBR shelves. And so, back-to-back.
I wrote above that those Nazis might pop up again. And so they will. But . . .
. . . to be continued . . .
COMING SOON, in a review to you: Trieste.
November 15, 2010
Sometimes when I finish a book I have a strange feeling, sort of a nostalgia, a loss of a world, a "being sorry that the book is over". It was usually good narrative that used to give me that feeling - until I read this book, the only descriptive travel book that managed to catch my heart and not my brain only.
My position toward this book is privileged, since I was born and raised in Trieste, and even though I haven't been living there for some time it's still my dearest town, the one I know better.
As a consequence, places, people, views, feelings I know so well kicked in, in my memory, in such a powerful way that sometimes I felt like I was losing the point of view of the author. But maybe that's what makes the author so remarkable, because this has never happened to me before when reading about Trieste - she really managed to get into the very heart of this city, and report the very feelings it arises. I was particularly impressed by the fact that she perceived what in my opinion are two of the main ghosts that haunt me as a Triestina: hypochondria and in particular the sense of wanting something without knowing what, expecting something, wondering about oneself and the meaning of one's own life.
I'm still wondering about the peculiar concept of nowhereness, that makes the title of the book, and that the author attributes to Trieste. I would like it to be true. And in part it is. I have the impression, though, that the author has somewhat idealized Trieste in this respect, in a way that's typical of visitors that don't actually live there for an extended, continuous time, dealing with the "everyday side" of a place. But maybe she just decided to leave that part out ... who cares after all? At the very end she admits to have portrayed nothing but herself, her Trieste. That's authentic enough.
I highly recommend this book.
August 8, 2020
Here's a book for lovers of all things Italian trumpets the blurb on GR (I think this cliche is permissible, given the role trumpeters play in Morris's work - for instance, see Katourian in Last Letters from Hav). I don't think this description is quite right, though, and consequently it's not very helpful to potential readers.
Firstly, Trieste's history is far too complex a matter to be seen as merely 'Italian', as anyone who's read the book ought to know. Its roots are also Slavic and Teutonic. Control of the city has passed between many entities and jurisdictions. It was Mussolini and his Fascists that contended Trieste was purely an Italian city and 'ethnically cleansed' its Slovenian and Jewish populations. As late as 1954, Trieste was a city state and 'Free Territory'.
Secondly, the book is actually for lovers of all things irreal. Yes, superficially it's about the real city. But it's about much more than that. It's about imagination, a state of mind and the traveller's journey through life. It's a synecdoche for the recent European experience. The Meaning of Nowhere - the clue is in the subtitle. Reading Trieste proves a much more transporting experience than one might derive from any number of standard travelogues. In truth, it has little in common with Morris's travel books on Oxford, say, or Venice, and much more with her magnificent Hav novellas. The closest point of reference that springs to mind would be Max Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. If you enjoyed that masterwork then I think you'll love this hypnotic excursion.
-----------------------
Update, August 2020
Morris uses her visits to the city over the decades to muse on the twists and turns of history, the folly of nationalism, the horrors of twentieth century warfare... A liberal progressive at heart, she sees multi-ethic Trieste as a blueprint for a better future. We learn of a variety of exiles, emigres and consuls who either loved or loathed their time in the city - James Joyce, Sir Richard Burton, Napoleon's kid brother, Jerome - and others born here - Italo Svevo, Scipio Slataper, Gottfried von Banfield... Thus, Morris brings Trieste to life, not just through its cityscape but in the lives of some of the characters associated with the city (the approach employed in Rory MacLean's enjoyable book about Berlin).
The book is also a meditation on Morris's place in the world. Through her analysis of the city, she is also exploring her own melancholy in old age, wondering where she fits in the world. As I noted above, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere... the key is in the subtitle. In what sense is Trieste 'nowhere'? Well, to begin with, it's a city that has outlived its purpose, the principal seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an entity that no longer exists. Morris senses an element of the irreal in this city. Nominally part of Italy and Italian by majority ethnicity, it is somehow apart from that country, geographically but also culturally and psychologically. Its history is also Slavic and Teutonic. For a while after WW2 it was a free city. It once stood at the head of the province of Istria. This has been lost to it. For a while it was an informal conduit between capitalist West and communist East. Now such distinctions have vanished forever. The city fits nowhere. On one level, Trieste's status becomes a metaphor for Morris's own condition, then. Born in England to an English mother and a Welsh father, over time she has moved from a feeling of Englishness to one of Welshness. She is both and neither. And then, Morris is an elderly, transgendered woman in a world slow to accept the latter status (the book was published in 2001). Morris herself has a sense of nowhere within. As John Lennon put it: He's a real nowhere man/Sitting in his nowhere land. She is nostalgic for a future in which precisely-defined borders fall away, both those between nations and genders. This would be her last book, she wrote forlornly, as a septuagenarian. Fortunately, it wasn't...
And now we reach my main caveat. Morris is liberal by instinct. But I had completely forgotten how reactionary she can seem upon occasion. There's no shortage of patrician writers out there aiming their socially elitist views at a Daily Telegraph-consuming audience if one chooses to read them. I don't. How about this?
Ours seemed to me a good empire then, and on the whole I still think so. Over the years I have learnt only occasionally to look back on it with shame (the fundamental principle of empire having soured on all of us), but more often with a mixture of pride, affection and pathos.
What? One has only to look back at those photos of disobedient Africans in iron collars to know how benign the British Empire was. Generation is no defence. Conrad, Forster and Orwell had long since reported back on the inhumanity of empire. Her books will find themselves thrown off Bristol docks if she's not careful.
Or this?
...a cultivated bourgeoisie. This was the class of society that had, in my view, held the balance of civilisation everywhere, tempering the arrogance of the aristocracy, restraining the crudity of the masses.
It's just your view, Jan, so that's all right? Only people from your privileged background have the right to become civilised and cultivated? Get back to your council houses Messrs Kelman and Bowie and keep your ideas to yourselves. I know the book is both an elegy for Trieste's past and Morris's, but these views make me deeply uneasy. And indeed:
It had few black, brown or yellow subjects...
Erm... I don't think you should say that, Great-Aunt Jan. But then we get the exquisite melancholy of lost ocean liners, the absurd theatre of Mussolini's imperial delusions... I'm otherwise so enamoured with the picture Morris evokes here that I shall turn a blind eye to these shortcomings.
Firstly, Trieste's history is far too complex a matter to be seen as merely 'Italian', as anyone who's read the book ought to know. Its roots are also Slavic and Teutonic. Control of the city has passed between many entities and jurisdictions. It was Mussolini and his Fascists that contended Trieste was purely an Italian city and 'ethnically cleansed' its Slovenian and Jewish populations. As late as 1954, Trieste was a city state and 'Free Territory'.
Secondly, the book is actually for lovers of all things irreal. Yes, superficially it's about the real city. But it's about much more than that. It's about imagination, a state of mind and the traveller's journey through life. It's a synecdoche for the recent European experience. The Meaning of Nowhere - the clue is in the subtitle. Reading Trieste proves a much more transporting experience than one might derive from any number of standard travelogues. In truth, it has little in common with Morris's travel books on Oxford, say, or Venice, and much more with her magnificent Hav novellas. The closest point of reference that springs to mind would be Max Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. If you enjoyed that masterwork then I think you'll love this hypnotic excursion.
-----------------------
Update, August 2020
Morris uses her visits to the city over the decades to muse on the twists and turns of history, the folly of nationalism, the horrors of twentieth century warfare... A liberal progressive at heart, she sees multi-ethic Trieste as a blueprint for a better future. We learn of a variety of exiles, emigres and consuls who either loved or loathed their time in the city - James Joyce, Sir Richard Burton, Napoleon's kid brother, Jerome - and others born here - Italo Svevo, Scipio Slataper, Gottfried von Banfield... Thus, Morris brings Trieste to life, not just through its cityscape but in the lives of some of the characters associated with the city (the approach employed in Rory MacLean's enjoyable book about Berlin).
The book is also a meditation on Morris's place in the world. Through her analysis of the city, she is also exploring her own melancholy in old age, wondering where she fits in the world. As I noted above, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere... the key is in the subtitle. In what sense is Trieste 'nowhere'? Well, to begin with, it's a city that has outlived its purpose, the principal seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an entity that no longer exists. Morris senses an element of the irreal in this city. Nominally part of Italy and Italian by majority ethnicity, it is somehow apart from that country, geographically but also culturally and psychologically. Its history is also Slavic and Teutonic. For a while after WW2 it was a free city. It once stood at the head of the province of Istria. This has been lost to it. For a while it was an informal conduit between capitalist West and communist East. Now such distinctions have vanished forever. The city fits nowhere. On one level, Trieste's status becomes a metaphor for Morris's own condition, then. Born in England to an English mother and a Welsh father, over time she has moved from a feeling of Englishness to one of Welshness. She is both and neither. And then, Morris is an elderly, transgendered woman in a world slow to accept the latter status (the book was published in 2001). Morris herself has a sense of nowhere within. As John Lennon put it: He's a real nowhere man/Sitting in his nowhere land. She is nostalgic for a future in which precisely-defined borders fall away, both those between nations and genders. This would be her last book, she wrote forlornly, as a septuagenarian. Fortunately, it wasn't...
And now we reach my main caveat. Morris is liberal by instinct. But I had completely forgotten how reactionary she can seem upon occasion. There's no shortage of patrician writers out there aiming their socially elitist views at a Daily Telegraph-consuming audience if one chooses to read them. I don't. How about this?
Ours seemed to me a good empire then, and on the whole I still think so. Over the years I have learnt only occasionally to look back on it with shame (the fundamental principle of empire having soured on all of us), but more often with a mixture of pride, affection and pathos.
What? One has only to look back at those photos of disobedient Africans in iron collars to know how benign the British Empire was. Generation is no defence. Conrad, Forster and Orwell had long since reported back on the inhumanity of empire. Her books will find themselves thrown off Bristol docks if she's not careful.
Or this?
...a cultivated bourgeoisie. This was the class of society that had, in my view, held the balance of civilisation everywhere, tempering the arrogance of the aristocracy, restraining the crudity of the masses.
It's just your view, Jan, so that's all right? Only people from your privileged background have the right to become civilised and cultivated? Get back to your council houses Messrs Kelman and Bowie and keep your ideas to yourselves. I know the book is both an elegy for Trieste's past and Morris's, but these views make me deeply uneasy. And indeed:
It had few black, brown or yellow subjects...
Erm... I don't think you should say that, Great-Aunt Jan. But then we get the exquisite melancholy of lost ocean liners, the absurd theatre of Mussolini's imperial delusions... I'm otherwise so enamoured with the picture Morris evokes here that I shall turn a blind eye to these shortcomings.
April 24, 2023
I haven't read much of Morris, it's true, but in this book it is mostly descriptions of cityscapes, neighborhoods, gardens and such. The author never introduces characters for local color. I mean living characters, not historical figures. Of the latter there are plenty: Maximilian I, Baron Pasquale Revoltella, Casanova, James Joyce, etc. This is not to say I'm not enjoying the book. The best parts are when she delves into the city's history: as the Austro-Hungarian empire's sole deep-water port, its post World War I transfer to Italy, etc. Or it's peculiar geographic location, shoehorned in among Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and the rest of Italy. She's a nimble writer. She started as a reporter and was the only journalist to accompany the first successful expedition to Mount Everest in 1953. An early multivolume work was her Pax Britannica Trilogy. So there's a uninformed temptation to think of her mostly as a historian; moreover, one who somewhat aggrandizes empire.
December 12, 2017
Trieste - "An outsider that I am, I still see myself as part of that half-real, half-imagined seaport, so now that after all these years I am writing a book about Trieste (at age 75, my last book, too)it is bound to be a work partly of civic impressionism, but partly of introspection----or self-indulgence."
The Habsburg monarchy in Vienna brought it into the modern world and chose Trieste to be its main deep-sea port on the Adriatic. By the twentieth century it prospered from trade with Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and central Europe. The city on the Adriatic Sea was considered the connection of Europe and Asia. The third entrance of the Suez Canal. In fact, the first commercial vessel to sail through the canal, was the Primo of Trieste before the inaugural ceremony in 1869.
But at the end of the first world war in 1919, Trieste found itself separated from the Habsburg empire, joined to the newly invented Yugoslavia kingdom and the united kingdom of Italy.
"For me Trieste is an allegory of limbo, nowhere defined by an hiatus after the second world war when Communists laid claim. In 1954 the city was handed back to Italy with its surrounds going to Yugoslavia."
In the twenty-first century, Trieste streets are jammed like any other European city with a quarter of a million people.
"My acquaintance with the city spans the whole of my adult life, but like my life it still gives me a waiting feeling, as if something big but unspecified is always about to happen."
Jan Morris lived and wrote as James Morris until she completed a change of sexual role in 1972.
The Habsburg monarchy in Vienna brought it into the modern world and chose Trieste to be its main deep-sea port on the Adriatic. By the twentieth century it prospered from trade with Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and central Europe. The city on the Adriatic Sea was considered the connection of Europe and Asia. The third entrance of the Suez Canal. In fact, the first commercial vessel to sail through the canal, was the Primo of Trieste before the inaugural ceremony in 1869.
But at the end of the first world war in 1919, Trieste found itself separated from the Habsburg empire, joined to the newly invented Yugoslavia kingdom and the united kingdom of Italy.
"For me Trieste is an allegory of limbo, nowhere defined by an hiatus after the second world war when Communists laid claim. In 1954 the city was handed back to Italy with its surrounds going to Yugoslavia."
In the twenty-first century, Trieste streets are jammed like any other European city with a quarter of a million people.
"My acquaintance with the city spans the whole of my adult life, but like my life it still gives me a waiting feeling, as if something big but unspecified is always about to happen."
Jan Morris lived and wrote as James Morris until she completed a change of sexual role in 1972.
April 28, 2021
Morris explores the idea of being 'in between' in this book. She first visited Trieste as James Morris, a young British sailor. Her reflections on Trieste, written as a much older Jan Morris, contemplate her own status as a person born between genders, and Trieste as a city between worlds, linked backed to Vienna and Austria as the Mediterranean sea port for the Habsburg Empire. It is also a city of the Mediterranean, now part of Italy but not at all convinced about that. This is a haunting book, misty, melancholic - very much like Trieste itself.
Morris is such an interesting writer because she connects history, geography, politics and social interactions with the places she observes so closely. In this book, she does all of that, and ties in some of the most significant part of her life's journey too. Unforgettable.
Morris is such an interesting writer because she connects history, geography, politics and social interactions with the places she observes so closely. In this book, she does all of that, and ties in some of the most significant part of her life's journey too. Unforgettable.
March 8, 2023
COMENTÁRIO
⭐⭐⭐⭐
"Trieste"
Jan Morris
Tradução de Paulo Faria
Todos os livros que tenho vindo a ler de "literatura de viagens" de Jan Morris são hinos maravilhosos aos locais que retratam. São obras cuidadas na informação que apresentam, nos comentários instigantes que pontuam as páginas (uma nota menos positiva para os comentários datados sobre racialidade)
Desta feita, li o último dos livros deste tipo que a autora escreveu e publicou em 2001 dedicado à cidade italiana/austríaca de Trieste. A escolha desta dupla pertença nacional é propositada dando destaque à ao passado e ao presente desta cidade, que a autora retrata magistralmente.
Ao longo de páginas de uma escrita fascinante a autora encantou o leitor, que ficou com um crescente vontade de visitar tal local.
Duas notas particulares: a multitude de detalhes literários do livro com múltiplas referências a Richard Burton, James Joyce, Italo Svevo e Rainier Maria Rilke.
E por fim as maravilhosas descrições da montanha/planalto de Karst que me fizeram viajar para as aulas de geoformologia cársica que tanto me apaixonaram nos anos noventa.
Que livro aprendizagem foi este!
(li de 07/03/2023 a 08/03/2023)
⭐⭐⭐⭐
"Trieste"
Jan Morris
Tradução de Paulo Faria
Todos os livros que tenho vindo a ler de "literatura de viagens" de Jan Morris são hinos maravilhosos aos locais que retratam. São obras cuidadas na informação que apresentam, nos comentários instigantes que pontuam as páginas (uma nota menos positiva para os comentários datados sobre racialidade)
Desta feita, li o último dos livros deste tipo que a autora escreveu e publicou em 2001 dedicado à cidade italiana/austríaca de Trieste. A escolha desta dupla pertença nacional é propositada dando destaque à ao passado e ao presente desta cidade, que a autora retrata magistralmente.
Ao longo de páginas de uma escrita fascinante a autora encantou o leitor, que ficou com um crescente vontade de visitar tal local.
Duas notas particulares: a multitude de detalhes literários do livro com múltiplas referências a Richard Burton, James Joyce, Italo Svevo e Rainier Maria Rilke.
E por fim as maravilhosas descrições da montanha/planalto de Karst que me fizeram viajar para as aulas de geoformologia cársica que tanto me apaixonaram nos anos noventa.
Que livro aprendizagem foi este!
(li de 07/03/2023 a 08/03/2023)
October 9, 2015
For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to visit Trieste. In 1980s Nakhalpara, poring over the atlas at home after school, that odd name snuck away at the top of the Adriatic Sea, just where the leg of Italy meets the European landmass – that name “Trieste” used to make me wonder. A few years later, the ringing words of Churchill’s Fulton speech floated down across the decades in grainy black-and-white on BBC: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Stettin, Trieste – what did these names signify? What kind of places were they, marking out the territorial limits of the Cold War?
I went to Trieste without much in the way of expectation. I only knew of a few vague markers – Habsburgs, James Joyce, Churchill, the Cold War. So that when I finally walked out into the city on that first morning, I was thoroughly unprepared for what met me. What I found was a true jewel of Mitteleuropa, once the principal seaport of the Habsburgs and perhaps the wealthiest city in the empire after Vienna. Today it is nothing more than a quiet provincial town on the Slovene border, with the vast Slavic hinterland beyond that stretches all the way from Istria to Vladivostok – but in Trieste itself, along every avenue and on every street corner still, there is evidence of such splendid riches – dazzling buildings and fabulous piazzas and the soaring cathedrals of a dozen different faiths - that you cannot help but fall into a meditative mood, pondering on the past, on the faded glory of lost empires, on the transience and maybe even futility of all human endeavour.
All that splendour still exists intact, but on the quays that once crawled with sailors and merchants from all over the world, dense with the sea-traffic of six continents, on the docks that morning I could see just one solitary vessel moored for fitouts. On that first day of exploration, Trieste reminded me of a walk long ago along the corniche in Alexandria, of mornings on the Malecon in Havana, of the ruined amphitheatre on the seafront in Cadiz. Trieste belonged in that select company of the once mighty now brought low, but with enough evidence left over still to inspire bouts of melancholy, nostalgia and romantic regret. (And I haven’t even started on Joyce, Svevo and Trieste’s splendid literary heritage.)
So reading Jan Morris’s book on Trieste became practically an obligation. Morris is a writer after my own heart, and explores the above themes and many more in this extended love letter to her favorite city. She first went there as a young soldier after the Second World War (James Morris as she was at the time), when Trieste’s fate was still being fought over by the Italians and Tito’s Yugoslavs, not to be finalized for another decade. But the encounter proved decisive, and looking back from the vantage point of old age, Morris sets down a lifetime’s wisdom and learning in this book which is also a wonderfully well-written and highly evocative history of the Habsburgs’ Most Faithful City. She has all the answers: Why did I see so many Austrian licence plates in the Croatian resort of Opatija? Why is that big pier opposite Piazza Unita called Molo Audace? What was the function of the small park opposite the rail station in the early 1990s after the Berlin Wall fell? (It was the same park where 90 years earlier, Joyce had left his mistress Nora while he went to pick a drunken fight in the city centre.) Where did the explorer Burton live and die? Where is the Nobel winner Abdus Salam’s famous research base? Who was Oberdan, after whom a town square is now named? Is that church journal full of Glagolitic script still available for public viewing? When Franz Ferdinand died in Sarajevo that morning in 1914, ringing the death knell of European civilisation, which ship brought him back to Trieste for the final overland journey to Vienna? And just where did the young Sigmund Freud cut open all those hundreds of eels, trying to figure out their sex organs?
I am grateful for the things I did get to see on my trip - the view from the obelisk high up in Opicina, with panoramas of the city backed by the Adriatic, the famous piazza where 77 years before me, Mussolini himself held a jampacked crowd of fanatics and followers spellbound, the house yes the very house where Joyce began to write Ulysses. But there is material enough in Morris’ book, questions unanswered and sites unseen, to justify future trips, many more of them, to Trieste. Time did not permit me to see the castle of Miramare, but how to resist Maximilian’s pride and joy, now seeped in the sadness of eternity, because it was the same Maximilian whose life came to such a sticky end in Mexico 150 years ago, sacrificed to lurid fantasies of empire and providing fodder for literature and film and Mexican legend ever since, featured in the middle parts of Bolano’s "The Savage Detectives" and inspiring a vast, celebrated novel by Fernando del Paso? Having read Morris’ descriptions of the savage winter wind called "bora" and seen old cartoons of it in Google Images, this too is a phenom that I must experience in person! I didn’t visit the Lapidary Gardens by San Giusto, nor did I see the General Post Office or the Museo Revoltella, both described by Morris in such glowing terms.
Above all, Morris’ book - her last one after a life devoted to literature - is best on the grudging tolerance and remarkable human diversity of the Habsburg experiment, Stefan Zweig’s famed world of yesterday, something that I cannot help but feel is being slowly reformed in a different shape with the EU project, although not forgetting to acknowledge at the same time the immense human and economic cost of the common currency. Towards the end, her ruminations on history, memory and mortality soar into a sort of prose-poetry, and the nowhereness of the book’s title hoves into full view. Like a fly encased in ancient amber or a mammoth in the Siberian ice, Trieste is forever trapped in time.
*
Names and images keep flooding back to me. Antonio Smareglia in the shadow of the arena in Pula, the same Smareglia whose operas were staged at the Teatro Verdi, the same acronym VERDI which became a touchstone for Italian irredentism. My tour guide, a lifelong Triestina, whose grandmother studied English under Joyce’s younger brother Stanislaus. The hotel where the scholar Winckelmann died, the cafes Stella Polare and San Marco where the intelligentsia hung out. And always above me, the Habsburg streetlamps, that lovely, unique creation, a perfect golden sphere of glass trapped in a fine wire mesh, which for me is the enduring symbol of Trieste and its Habsburgs, and the image that spurs me on to my next book, Simon Winder’s Danubia.
I went to Trieste without much in the way of expectation. I only knew of a few vague markers – Habsburgs, James Joyce, Churchill, the Cold War. So that when I finally walked out into the city on that first morning, I was thoroughly unprepared for what met me. What I found was a true jewel of Mitteleuropa, once the principal seaport of the Habsburgs and perhaps the wealthiest city in the empire after Vienna. Today it is nothing more than a quiet provincial town on the Slovene border, with the vast Slavic hinterland beyond that stretches all the way from Istria to Vladivostok – but in Trieste itself, along every avenue and on every street corner still, there is evidence of such splendid riches – dazzling buildings and fabulous piazzas and the soaring cathedrals of a dozen different faiths - that you cannot help but fall into a meditative mood, pondering on the past, on the faded glory of lost empires, on the transience and maybe even futility of all human endeavour.
All that splendour still exists intact, but on the quays that once crawled with sailors and merchants from all over the world, dense with the sea-traffic of six continents, on the docks that morning I could see just one solitary vessel moored for fitouts. On that first day of exploration, Trieste reminded me of a walk long ago along the corniche in Alexandria, of mornings on the Malecon in Havana, of the ruined amphitheatre on the seafront in Cadiz. Trieste belonged in that select company of the once mighty now brought low, but with enough evidence left over still to inspire bouts of melancholy, nostalgia and romantic regret. (And I haven’t even started on Joyce, Svevo and Trieste’s splendid literary heritage.)
So reading Jan Morris’s book on Trieste became practically an obligation. Morris is a writer after my own heart, and explores the above themes and many more in this extended love letter to her favorite city. She first went there as a young soldier after the Second World War (James Morris as she was at the time), when Trieste’s fate was still being fought over by the Italians and Tito’s Yugoslavs, not to be finalized for another decade. But the encounter proved decisive, and looking back from the vantage point of old age, Morris sets down a lifetime’s wisdom and learning in this book which is also a wonderfully well-written and highly evocative history of the Habsburgs’ Most Faithful City. She has all the answers: Why did I see so many Austrian licence plates in the Croatian resort of Opatija? Why is that big pier opposite Piazza Unita called Molo Audace? What was the function of the small park opposite the rail station in the early 1990s after the Berlin Wall fell? (It was the same park where 90 years earlier, Joyce had left his mistress Nora while he went to pick a drunken fight in the city centre.) Where did the explorer Burton live and die? Where is the Nobel winner Abdus Salam’s famous research base? Who was Oberdan, after whom a town square is now named? Is that church journal full of Glagolitic script still available for public viewing? When Franz Ferdinand died in Sarajevo that morning in 1914, ringing the death knell of European civilisation, which ship brought him back to Trieste for the final overland journey to Vienna? And just where did the young Sigmund Freud cut open all those hundreds of eels, trying to figure out their sex organs?
I am grateful for the things I did get to see on my trip - the view from the obelisk high up in Opicina, with panoramas of the city backed by the Adriatic, the famous piazza where 77 years before me, Mussolini himself held a jampacked crowd of fanatics and followers spellbound, the house yes the very house where Joyce began to write Ulysses. But there is material enough in Morris’ book, questions unanswered and sites unseen, to justify future trips, many more of them, to Trieste. Time did not permit me to see the castle of Miramare, but how to resist Maximilian’s pride and joy, now seeped in the sadness of eternity, because it was the same Maximilian whose life came to such a sticky end in Mexico 150 years ago, sacrificed to lurid fantasies of empire and providing fodder for literature and film and Mexican legend ever since, featured in the middle parts of Bolano’s "The Savage Detectives" and inspiring a vast, celebrated novel by Fernando del Paso? Having read Morris’ descriptions of the savage winter wind called "bora" and seen old cartoons of it in Google Images, this too is a phenom that I must experience in person! I didn’t visit the Lapidary Gardens by San Giusto, nor did I see the General Post Office or the Museo Revoltella, both described by Morris in such glowing terms.
Above all, Morris’ book - her last one after a life devoted to literature - is best on the grudging tolerance and remarkable human diversity of the Habsburg experiment, Stefan Zweig’s famed world of yesterday, something that I cannot help but feel is being slowly reformed in a different shape with the EU project, although not forgetting to acknowledge at the same time the immense human and economic cost of the common currency. Towards the end, her ruminations on history, memory and mortality soar into a sort of prose-poetry, and the nowhereness of the book’s title hoves into full view. Like a fly encased in ancient amber or a mammoth in the Siberian ice, Trieste is forever trapped in time.
*
Names and images keep flooding back to me. Antonio Smareglia in the shadow of the arena in Pula, the same Smareglia whose operas were staged at the Teatro Verdi, the same acronym VERDI which became a touchstone for Italian irredentism. My tour guide, a lifelong Triestina, whose grandmother studied English under Joyce’s younger brother Stanislaus. The hotel where the scholar Winckelmann died, the cafes Stella Polare and San Marco where the intelligentsia hung out. And always above me, the Habsburg streetlamps, that lovely, unique creation, a perfect golden sphere of glass trapped in a fine wire mesh, which for me is the enduring symbol of Trieste and its Habsburgs, and the image that spurs me on to my next book, Simon Winder’s Danubia.
Read
September 4, 2021I have to say that a lot of this is rather eerily reminiscent of the history of Odessa that I read earlier in the year. Both were cosmopolitan port cities that were created out of fiat from small towns, by the Catherine the Great and the Hapsburg Emperor respectively. Odessa's construction and government were heavily guided by French migrants while much of the city's population throughout its history were Jewish. Trieste also had a large Jewish community as well as a largely Italian population even as it was governed from Vienna and was surrounded by Slovenian and Croatian populations. Both attracted a range of rootless travellers, from Pushkin and Babel to Joyce and Burton. Both found themselves sitting within differing countries over time and suffering from the rise of nationalism, while occupation during the Second World War was fatal to the Jewish populations of both cities.
June 9, 2024
Es el primer libro de Jan Morris que leo y me he encontrado con una evocadora descripción y un recorrido por la apasionante historia de la ciudad de Trieste. Que no es poco, porque he aprendido un montón de cosas. Pero con la fama de escritora de viajes que tiene esta autora británica, fallo mío, me esperaba más viaje y más descripción de triestinos vivos. Quienes sí que se pasean por estas reflexivas páginas son otros autores fascinados con esta ciudad de exiliados y cruce de caminos: Joyce, Italo Svevo, Rilke, Johann Joachim Winckelmann o Sir Richard Burton. Reflexiva porque se identifica y trata de encontrarle un sentido a su vida a través de la historia de la ciudad. La primera vez que la visitó era un soldado del ejército británico y cuando escribe estas páginas es una septuagenaria. Entre tanto encontraremos una apasionante vida, con un cambio de sexo en los 70, pero que tendemos que descubrir en otro libro, ya que aquí apenas hace mención de datos autobiográficos. Cierta nostalgia por el imperio y ciertos aires de clase media que no me han acabado de encajar. Habría querido que me gustase más pero, en cualquier caso, es un buen libro.
March 11, 2021
For more reviews and the 1001 Books Spreadsheet, visit http://arukiyomi.com
A very, very long time ago, I read a trilogy by a man name James Morris, the sublime Pax Britannica. It wasn’t until many years later that I realised the woman writing under the name Jan Morris was in fact the same person as James, if I’m allowed to say that. James became Jan in 1972. In fact, I still possess a set of that trilogy under the name of James.
Having eulogised the trilogy to Mrs Arukiyomi (who has, tellingly, yet to actually start it), I found myself staring at a copy of Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere on Christmas morning. Jan Morris having died in November, 2020, the missus thought that her final novel would be a fitting Christmas pressie.
The city is somewhere I came very close to visiting on a long overland trek from Beijing to Basel via 14 countries back in 2008. Hitchhiking up the Adriatic coast just north of Split, we were picked up by a guy delivering tyres not to Trieste, as we had hoped, but instead to Zagreb. It was a massive distance to bag in one hitch, and so we took it. I still have never visited Italy. Morris’ book was therefore a needed introduction.
Although Trieste can hardly be called Italy proper. Being, as it is geographically and therefore culturally, linguistally and so much other-ly on the periphery of that nation, it has struggled for its entire history to know exactly which direction to look for its sense of purpose. This is possibly why Morris considers it so fascinating because it, of course, allows the book to explore all sorts of issues with identity… a subject that is of some relevance for someone who has made the transition to transgender.
That Morris should end her writing career with a focus on Trieste is surely no accident. It was there that, arguably, James began his writing career having formed part of the British occupying forces at the end of WW2. Trieste was a regular part of life with many visits over the years. The book has a ring of melancholy throughout as it describes various aspects of the city’s history and ends quite movingly.
But I have to say, it didn’t captivate me throughout. Morris is astoundingly well read and while I do know a thing or two, it was hard to keep up sometimes. Thankfully, I have a fair bit of Joyce under my belt and have read Burton’s translation of The Book of the Thousand and One Nights (and, yes, all the footnotes!). I was therefore fascinated by accounts of these two residents of the city and how it had, possibly, influenced their writing. Much of the rest of it, though, passed me by.
It’s a pleasant enough read. At its best, the prose, is charged with meaning and evidence of months, years of meditation on the city… and therefore of life in general and Morris’ life in particular. I wouldn’t tell anyone they needed to go out and buy a copy, but if you do come across one and you fancy whiling away some hours in reverie, Morris’ Trieste may be just the place for you.
A very, very long time ago, I read a trilogy by a man name James Morris, the sublime Pax Britannica. It wasn’t until many years later that I realised the woman writing under the name Jan Morris was in fact the same person as James, if I’m allowed to say that. James became Jan in 1972. In fact, I still possess a set of that trilogy under the name of James.
Having eulogised the trilogy to Mrs Arukiyomi (who has, tellingly, yet to actually start it), I found myself staring at a copy of Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere on Christmas morning. Jan Morris having died in November, 2020, the missus thought that her final novel would be a fitting Christmas pressie.
The city is somewhere I came very close to visiting on a long overland trek from Beijing to Basel via 14 countries back in 2008. Hitchhiking up the Adriatic coast just north of Split, we were picked up by a guy delivering tyres not to Trieste, as we had hoped, but instead to Zagreb. It was a massive distance to bag in one hitch, and so we took it. I still have never visited Italy. Morris’ book was therefore a needed introduction.
Although Trieste can hardly be called Italy proper. Being, as it is geographically and therefore culturally, linguistally and so much other-ly on the periphery of that nation, it has struggled for its entire history to know exactly which direction to look for its sense of purpose. This is possibly why Morris considers it so fascinating because it, of course, allows the book to explore all sorts of issues with identity… a subject that is of some relevance for someone who has made the transition to transgender.
That Morris should end her writing career with a focus on Trieste is surely no accident. It was there that, arguably, James began his writing career having formed part of the British occupying forces at the end of WW2. Trieste was a regular part of life with many visits over the years. The book has a ring of melancholy throughout as it describes various aspects of the city’s history and ends quite movingly.
But I have to say, it didn’t captivate me throughout. Morris is astoundingly well read and while I do know a thing or two, it was hard to keep up sometimes. Thankfully, I have a fair bit of Joyce under my belt and have read Burton’s translation of The Book of the Thousand and One Nights (and, yes, all the footnotes!). I was therefore fascinated by accounts of these two residents of the city and how it had, possibly, influenced their writing. Much of the rest of it, though, passed me by.
It’s a pleasant enough read. At its best, the prose, is charged with meaning and evidence of months, years of meditation on the city… and therefore of life in general and Morris’ life in particular. I wouldn’t tell anyone they needed to go out and buy a copy, but if you do come across one and you fancy whiling away some hours in reverie, Morris’ Trieste may be just the place for you.
April 29, 2020
This book by renowned travel writer Jan Morris is both a fascinating account of a lesser-known city and a meditation on Morris' own feelings as she reflects on her memories. It is beautifully written, thoughtful and evocative.
Trieste is portrayed as a melancholy place, a kind of 'nowhere' that has passed through changes of history and geography until it ended up with no real place to belong. Even so, Morris finds beauty and kindness in the city and its people, and it is this sensitivity towards Trieste that makes this such a moving and enchanting read.
This is a very special kind of travel writing, and has definitely inspired me to seek out more of Morris' work.
Trieste is portrayed as a melancholy place, a kind of 'nowhere' that has passed through changes of history and geography until it ended up with no real place to belong. Even so, Morris finds beauty and kindness in the city and its people, and it is this sensitivity towards Trieste that makes this such a moving and enchanting read.
This is a very special kind of travel writing, and has definitely inspired me to seek out more of Morris' work.
October 21, 2012
This is Jan Morris‘s melancholy love letter to a city that was formed by a dozen different civilizations over the course of four thousand years but seems not to belong to any of them. Indo-Europeans known as Illyrians founded the city, then the Romans took it, the city-state of Venice colonized it, the Habsburgs occupied it, and finally the modern state of Italy got it after World War I. A hundred years ago, Trieste was one of the most bustling ports in Europe but is now largely forgotten, even by Italians: though Trieste is the capital of the Italian province also named Trieste, 70 percent of Italians polled in 1999 didn’t even know it was in Italy! For Morris, the transience of Trieste’s glory is a metaphor for the impermanence of life itself.
Morris is interested in Trieste mainly as a utopia: she conceives of it as the capital city of all the people who don’t feel at home in the countries of their birth and are always longing for something at the edge of definition. Internal exiles. What Melville calls Isolatoes.
“They share with each other, across all nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them, you will not be mocked or resented. . . They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.”
Morris takes a great deal of time and care to report the history and physical characteristics of Trieste accurately. She wants to locate her idea of utopia paradoxically in a real place, and the accumulation of well-observed, odd details about the city has the curious effect of building a portrait of dislocation that seeps outside of the book and into the place where you're reading it, so that every place on earth begins to seem a little odd and dislocated. Through Trieste, Morris finds the nowhere that is everywhere and claims the city as the natural home to everyone whose unfulfilled longings are as important to them as their grandest accomplishments.
Morris is interested in Trieste mainly as a utopia: she conceives of it as the capital city of all the people who don’t feel at home in the countries of their birth and are always longing for something at the edge of definition. Internal exiles. What Melville calls Isolatoes.
“They share with each other, across all nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them, you will not be mocked or resented. . . They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.”
Morris takes a great deal of time and care to report the history and physical characteristics of Trieste accurately. She wants to locate her idea of utopia paradoxically in a real place, and the accumulation of well-observed, odd details about the city has the curious effect of building a portrait of dislocation that seeps outside of the book and into the place where you're reading it, so that every place on earth begins to seem a little odd and dislocated. Through Trieste, Morris finds the nowhere that is everywhere and claims the city as the natural home to everyone whose unfulfilled longings are as important to them as their grandest accomplishments.
June 18, 2021
De seu título completo «Trieste e o significado de lugar nenhum», agora editado pela Tinta-da-China com tradução da minha lavra, este é o último livro de Jan Morris, nascida James Morris em 1926 e falecida em 2020. Reputada autora de livros de viagens, este é um dos seus livros mais belos, circunstância a que não é estranho o tom de despedida que perpassa por estas páginas. Jan Morris sabia que estava a escrever o seu último livro e, com serenidade e alegria de viver, despede-se da vida e dos lugares que mais amou no mundo: o País de Gales e Trieste.
Jan Morris conta aqui, no seu estilo inconfundível em que se mistura o intimismo e a perspectiva histórica mais vasta, a história de Trieste, uma cidade encravada entre o Ocidente e o Oriente, um lugar que conheceu uma grandeza efémera (como principal porto de mar do Império Austro-Húngaro) para depois cair na irrelevância (se é que há no mundo lugares irrelevantes). Dá-nos a conhecer a galeria heterogénea de exilados ou forasteiros que buscaram refúgio em Trieste e que ali encontraram (ou não) uma certa paz: James Joyce, é claro, mas também Freud, Stendhal, Sir Richard Francis Burton e tantos outros. E, de certa maneira, traça um grande fresco da história recente da Europa.
No fim de contas, Morris celebra Trieste como «A capital de lugar nenhum», uma terra de acolhimento para todos os que, como ela, sempre se sentiram um pouco perdidos, sem nunca chegarem verdadeiramente a encontrar uma pátria. Cidadãos do mundo, na verdadeira acepção da palavra. E as páginas com que Morris conclui este belíssimo livro são das mais comoventes que ela escreveu.
Jan Morris conta aqui, no seu estilo inconfundível em que se mistura o intimismo e a perspectiva histórica mais vasta, a história de Trieste, uma cidade encravada entre o Ocidente e o Oriente, um lugar que conheceu uma grandeza efémera (como principal porto de mar do Império Austro-Húngaro) para depois cair na irrelevância (se é que há no mundo lugares irrelevantes). Dá-nos a conhecer a galeria heterogénea de exilados ou forasteiros que buscaram refúgio em Trieste e que ali encontraram (ou não) uma certa paz: James Joyce, é claro, mas também Freud, Stendhal, Sir Richard Francis Burton e tantos outros. E, de certa maneira, traça um grande fresco da história recente da Europa.
No fim de contas, Morris celebra Trieste como «A capital de lugar nenhum», uma terra de acolhimento para todos os que, como ela, sempre se sentiram um pouco perdidos, sem nunca chegarem verdadeiramente a encontrar uma pátria. Cidadãos do mundo, na verdadeira acepção da palavra. E as páginas com que Morris conclui este belíssimo livro são das mais comoventes que ela escreveu.
July 8, 2012
We savor those rare experiences when we discover a marvelous author with a lengthy bibliography. Jan Morris is such a find for me. As a fan of travel writing, how can I have overlooked her all these years? Looking forward to catching up on her substantial back catalog.
I read this on a plane to Trieste. By the time I touched down, I felt I understood the town, that I had gained a sense of it in a way that effectively melds history, culture, geography, inhabitants, quirks, and features. On our first half-day in town, I referred to so many passages in the book that you'd think it was a travel guide. It's not, but I wish I could read a similar treatise for every place I've visited or plan to visit.
I read this on a plane to Trieste. By the time I touched down, I felt I understood the town, that I had gained a sense of it in a way that effectively melds history, culture, geography, inhabitants, quirks, and features. On our first half-day in town, I referred to so many passages in the book that you'd think it was a travel guide. It's not, but I wish I could read a similar treatise for every place I've visited or plan to visit.
August 12, 2023
Did not quite deliver the way Venice did, perhaps because I expected something either less numinous, or, on the contrary, a "Trieste state of mind" book.
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora o their own. They are the lordly ones! The come in all colours. They can be Christian or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.
January 24, 2021
O carte care plaseaza istoria in ghidul turistic, plina de emotie, principala fiind nostalgia. Nostalgia pentru sensul imperial al unui oras-port liber, a carui ghilde si banci s-au dezvoltat sub semnul ordinii si birocratiei atente a dublei monarhii, K und K, inmultind averile si conectandu-l cu intreaga lume. Nostalgia pentru semnele aparitiei Canalului Suez, procesiunii funerare a arhiducelui Franz Ferdinand, ce a precedat prima mare catastrofa a secolului 20, a locurilor ce apar in cartile lui Joice, Rilke, Svevo si multi altii care au trecut pe aici.
Un oras care a apartinut atator natiuni, populat de natiunea expatilor din toata lumea care s-au simtit aici acasa, macinat de iredentism, care l-a adus in sanul Italiei, unde si-a pierdut, printre alte porturi mai mari, sensul sau de a fi - port liber, iesirea la mare a unui mare imperiu.
Precis vreau sa vad totul cu ochii mei acum, caci tare seamana cu destinul Chisinaului, oras fara sens, dar plin de amintiri frumoase si care nu va mai fi niciodata la fel. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind.
Un oras care a apartinut atator natiuni, populat de natiunea expatilor din toata lumea care s-au simtit aici acasa, macinat de iredentism, care l-a adus in sanul Italiei, unde si-a pierdut, printre alte porturi mai mari, sensul sau de a fi - port liber, iesirea la mare a unui mare imperiu.
Precis vreau sa vad totul cu ochii mei acum, caci tare seamana cu destinul Chisinaului, oras fara sens, dar plin de amintiri frumoase si care nu va mai fi niciodata la fel. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind.
Read
August 18, 2024Definitely not comprehensive but the best parts captured my sense of the Trieste feeling: idleness, pleasant people, city searching for new purpose. I’m conflicted because this book alternates from slow and dated (language, worldview) to philosophical and thought provoking (Triesticity is a great word)
February 27, 2009
It took me a long time to get through "Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere" because it’s a dense book, full of centuries’ worth of historical lessons and anecdotes, and because Morris writes in a careful third-person style that’s very different from the zany, personal stories that are popular now.
The time was well spent, though. Morris paints an interesting portrait of Trieste, a city I’ve never been to (and one which, according to a possibly apocryphal 1999 poll, 70% of Italians don’t realize is in Italy). She covers all aspects of Trieste’s history and culture, from the city’s Jewish Diaspora to the city’s relations with its Slavic neighbors.
Just when the anecdotes start to get a little cloying and you’re starting to wonder where she’s going with all of them, Morris wraps up the book—her last, she says--with a magnificent chapter that explains why Trieste has been significant to her throughout the years. It’s a beautiful end to not just a book but an entire distinguished writing career. The final chapter manages to tell us a lot about both the author and the city, without being either self-indulgent or dryly historical. In my experience, that’s a hard balance to strike. It’s easy to tell your own story about a place, and easy to impart a history lesson, but very hard to make your own experiences interesting and relevant to a general audience. This book shows how that’s done.
The time was well spent, though. Morris paints an interesting portrait of Trieste, a city I’ve never been to (and one which, according to a possibly apocryphal 1999 poll, 70% of Italians don’t realize is in Italy). She covers all aspects of Trieste’s history and culture, from the city’s Jewish Diaspora to the city’s relations with its Slavic neighbors.
Just when the anecdotes start to get a little cloying and you’re starting to wonder where she’s going with all of them, Morris wraps up the book—her last, she says--with a magnificent chapter that explains why Trieste has been significant to her throughout the years. It’s a beautiful end to not just a book but an entire distinguished writing career. The final chapter manages to tell us a lot about both the author and the city, without being either self-indulgent or dryly historical. In my experience, that’s a hard balance to strike. It’s easy to tell your own story about a place, and easy to impart a history lesson, but very hard to make your own experiences interesting and relevant to a general audience. This book shows how that’s done.
June 13, 2018
A fusty, benign look at a very, VERY specific part of the world, which misses ONE IMPORTANT POINT (more below).
I read this because my "native place" is a small town just outside of Trieste. It's where both my parents are from, and their parents, and their parents, and their... you get the idea. I honestly cannot believe this book would be of interest to people who don't have a personal connection to this place, since (a) Trieste is basically boring and (b) this book is just OK.
But for me, it was thrilling - THRILLING - to have an English-language book about this very specific posto, and I'll admit, firstly, that the book faithfully captures the narrative that Triestines tell themselves about themselves. That is, a narrative that (1) pities itself for being, old, aging, forgotten by time and the world, and dull, (2) prides itself on its Hapsburgian past (in a super reactionary/monarchist way - glorious Kaiserlich und Königlich blah blah), and (3) recognizes the inherent lies of 19th century European nationalism/patriotism. That Morris accurately captured what I had previously believed were specific attributes of how my FAMILY sees the world, and that these attributes are, instead, specifically cultural, was eye-opening. And interesting in a meta way.
On (1), Trieste is one of the oldest cities (demographically) of an already (urgently) aging country (Italy). I think the birthrate is, like, -0.7. JK. But it is bad. I landed at the Trieste airport recently and was the youngest person at the Arrivals gate by about 30 years. I am 34 years old.
On (2), many in my fam considers themselves proudly Austro-Hungarian, though they hold Italian passports, speak Italian (and no German), and Franz Ferdinand died 104 years ago. Reminder: the year is 2018. Nonetheless, every person in my fam has a picture of our great great uncle when he met Franz Josef in the 1910s. SO KAISERLICH!
On (3), ah yes, this is the most interesting bit. Trieste has changed nationality so many times in living memory (Austro-Hungarian until WW1, Italian until WW2, debated "Free City" under the US in the 50s, Italian from 1953, split by the Iron Curtain) and it's been such a perennial mix of cultures (Friulan, Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, Austrian, etc) and mix of ideologies (monarchists, Italian irredentists, Tito Communists, Fascists), that "official nationality" has come to mean very little in the local mindset. National fervor is seen with an arched eyebrow. What nation? DO YOU KNOW HOW EASILY NATIONS CAN CHANGE? Morris makes good points on this, and juxtaposes it interestingly with her background as Welsh-English, brought up during GLORIOUS BRITISH EMPIRE days, and then traveling the world.
But! BUT! And this is the big failing of the book (and, of course, of Trieste itself): Morris JUST BARELY acknowledges the very modern, very not-Hapsburg, very NOT-WHITE reality of modern Trieste: that is, the enormous late 20th century and Refugee Crisis migrations that have rocked this region.
Morris was writing in 2000 or so. But even then (and always!), Trieste - as a port city on the edge of the Balkans and western Europe - has seen many, many, MANY immigrants and refugees. I found it appalling, in a way, that Morris (who clearly romanticized the K u K/old Europe multi-culturalism) was so willfully blind to Trieste's modern (and problematic) history with people of color. Her one acknowledgement that you see a lot of black dudes selling baubles in Piazza Unita is to say that those dudes are from Italy's Ethiopian/Abyssinian colonies?!?!!? My head exploded here. Wwwwhaaaat? Lady, those dudes are not long-ago immigrants from (romantic?!) 1930s Italian/Fascist would-be colonies, they're almost certainly fresh off the frickin' literal boat - the one that almost sunk in the Mediterranean! Similarly, she notes the growing Chinese presence - but doesn't investigate their history in the city - and she completely ignores the *enormous* Bangladeshi presence in Trieste's ship-building industry (ostensibly it's main thing).
To be fair, Morris doesn't write about this stuff because Triestine culture also doesn't acknowledge this stuff as an integral part of its history. Indeed, Morris does a great job of writing a book that panders to Triestine's self-image - but not their ACTUAL image. Don't even get me started. It's absurd to me that Triestines (and Morris... and my fam...) pompously celebrate the vibrant ethnic stew that this city has always been by noting the Italians! Slovenians! Austrians! But then everyone's panties get bunched up when they see a, gasp, non-white Triestine community. And there is ZERO curiosity. I mean, it's stupid. STUPIDLY RACIST.
Note: The current mayor was supported by Lega Nord (now just "Lega"), the far-right, xenophobic, Euro-skeptic Italian party that hates refugees, hates the Euro, and wants to "make Italy great again". The pressures of the refugee crisis on local politics, local culture, are HUGE here. I would have LOVED to see Morris - or any author, really, Italian or English-language - contextualize Trieste's narrowly-focused romanticization of its (only white) history with its ACTUAL history as a port along numerous international migration routes. HMM. PERHAPS I SHALL ACCEPT THIS CHALLENGE.
I read this because my "native place" is a small town just outside of Trieste. It's where both my parents are from, and their parents, and their parents, and their... you get the idea. I honestly cannot believe this book would be of interest to people who don't have a personal connection to this place, since (a) Trieste is basically boring and (b) this book is just OK.
But for me, it was thrilling - THRILLING - to have an English-language book about this very specific posto, and I'll admit, firstly, that the book faithfully captures the narrative that Triestines tell themselves about themselves. That is, a narrative that (1) pities itself for being, old, aging, forgotten by time and the world, and dull, (2) prides itself on its Hapsburgian past (in a super reactionary/monarchist way - glorious Kaiserlich und Königlich blah blah), and (3) recognizes the inherent lies of 19th century European nationalism/patriotism. That Morris accurately captured what I had previously believed were specific attributes of how my FAMILY sees the world, and that these attributes are, instead, specifically cultural, was eye-opening. And interesting in a meta way.
On (1), Trieste is one of the oldest cities (demographically) of an already (urgently) aging country (Italy). I think the birthrate is, like, -0.7. JK. But it is bad. I landed at the Trieste airport recently and was the youngest person at the Arrivals gate by about 30 years. I am 34 years old.
On (2), many in my fam considers themselves proudly Austro-Hungarian, though they hold Italian passports, speak Italian (and no German), and Franz Ferdinand died 104 years ago. Reminder: the year is 2018. Nonetheless, every person in my fam has a picture of our great great uncle when he met Franz Josef in the 1910s. SO KAISERLICH!
On (3), ah yes, this is the most interesting bit. Trieste has changed nationality so many times in living memory (Austro-Hungarian until WW1, Italian until WW2, debated "Free City" under the US in the 50s, Italian from 1953, split by the Iron Curtain) and it's been such a perennial mix of cultures (Friulan, Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, Austrian, etc) and mix of ideologies (monarchists, Italian irredentists, Tito Communists, Fascists), that "official nationality" has come to mean very little in the local mindset. National fervor is seen with an arched eyebrow. What nation? DO YOU KNOW HOW EASILY NATIONS CAN CHANGE? Morris makes good points on this, and juxtaposes it interestingly with her background as Welsh-English, brought up during GLORIOUS BRITISH EMPIRE days, and then traveling the world.
But! BUT! And this is the big failing of the book (and, of course, of Trieste itself): Morris JUST BARELY acknowledges the very modern, very not-Hapsburg, very NOT-WHITE reality of modern Trieste: that is, the enormous late 20th century and Refugee Crisis migrations that have rocked this region.
Morris was writing in 2000 or so. But even then (and always!), Trieste - as a port city on the edge of the Balkans and western Europe - has seen many, many, MANY immigrants and refugees. I found it appalling, in a way, that Morris (who clearly romanticized the K u K/old Europe multi-culturalism) was so willfully blind to Trieste's modern (and problematic) history with people of color. Her one acknowledgement that you see a lot of black dudes selling baubles in Piazza Unita is to say that those dudes are from Italy's Ethiopian/Abyssinian colonies?!?!!? My head exploded here. Wwwwhaaaat? Lady, those dudes are not long-ago immigrants from (romantic?!) 1930s Italian/Fascist would-be colonies, they're almost certainly fresh off the frickin' literal boat - the one that almost sunk in the Mediterranean! Similarly, she notes the growing Chinese presence - but doesn't investigate their history in the city - and she completely ignores the *enormous* Bangladeshi presence in Trieste's ship-building industry (ostensibly it's main thing).
To be fair, Morris doesn't write about this stuff because Triestine culture also doesn't acknowledge this stuff as an integral part of its history. Indeed, Morris does a great job of writing a book that panders to Triestine's self-image - but not their ACTUAL image. Don't even get me started. It's absurd to me that Triestines (and Morris... and my fam...) pompously celebrate the vibrant ethnic stew that this city has always been by noting the Italians! Slovenians! Austrians! But then everyone's panties get bunched up when they see a, gasp, non-white Triestine community. And there is ZERO curiosity. I mean, it's stupid. STUPIDLY RACIST.
Note: The current mayor was supported by Lega Nord (now just "Lega"), the far-right, xenophobic, Euro-skeptic Italian party that hates refugees, hates the Euro, and wants to "make Italy great again". The pressures of the refugee crisis on local politics, local culture, are HUGE here. I would have LOVED to see Morris - or any author, really, Italian or English-language - contextualize Trieste's narrowly-focused romanticization of its (only white) history with its ACTUAL history as a port along numerous international migration routes. HMM. PERHAPS I SHALL ACCEPT THIS CHALLENGE.
October 17, 2021
Why read a travel narrative about a place you will never visit? Why should you spend time exploring the streets and back alleys of a city lost in the twisted path of historical irrelevancy? One reason is the writing of the great Jan Morris. When she died in late 2020, "Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere" was mentioned in several obituaries as being among her finest books.
Ms. Morris visited Trieste over a fifty year period, starting with a posting to the Free Territory of Trieste, during the joint British–American occupation in 1945. She revisited many times and took the time to learn the history and literary background of this commercial hub. Trieste was the Mediterranean outlet for the Austro-Hungarian empire before WWI, attracting shipping, commerce, and exiles. After WWII, control was finally granted to Italy, but the proximity of Yugoslavia, and later Slovenia and Croatia, exerted a strong Slavic influence.
Trieste was multicultural before multiculturalism was a thing. It attracted writers, composers, artists, and dethroned royalty. James Joyce lived there for several years, haunting the cafes and brothels. At times, Morris seems to just be wandering the streets and countryside, collecting odd bits of history. But oh, the last two chapters--totally beautiful. Recommended for those with wanderlust in their souls.
Ms. Morris visited Trieste over a fifty year period, starting with a posting to the Free Territory of Trieste, during the joint British–American occupation in 1945. She revisited many times and took the time to learn the history and literary background of this commercial hub. Trieste was the Mediterranean outlet for the Austro-Hungarian empire before WWI, attracting shipping, commerce, and exiles. After WWII, control was finally granted to Italy, but the proximity of Yugoslavia, and later Slovenia and Croatia, exerted a strong Slavic influence.
Trieste was multicultural before multiculturalism was a thing. It attracted writers, composers, artists, and dethroned royalty. James Joyce lived there for several years, haunting the cafes and brothels. At times, Morris seems to just be wandering the streets and countryside, collecting odd bits of history. But oh, the last two chapters--totally beautiful. Recommended for those with wanderlust in their souls.
October 14, 2023
Letto la prima volta in inglese.
La sinossi non spiega che Jan Morris era con le truppe angloamericane che entrarono a Trieste e ci liberarono dai tedeschi.
Jan si innamorò di Trieste e ci scrisse questo libro.
Edit 14-10-23 ( grazie a @Marina che vorrebbe leggerlo 😉)
Jan Morris:
“I palazzi bianchi, qua e là l'arancione ambrato dei tetti, Trieste scende con maestosa lentezza incontro al suo mare. Non è facile riconoscere i segni del suo passato, gli emblemi, le cicatrici. Il viandante tende a infondere nelle facciate, nelle piazze e nei vicoli il proprio stato d'animo. Al soffio della bora, Jan Morris ha avvertito i molteplici spiriti della città agitarsi: fiera e ambigua, squallida e aristocratica, ospitale e razzista, latina e slava, occidentale e orientale, maschile e femminile.
E mentre mette a fuoco ogni dettaglio, la memoria prende il sopravvento e rievoca navi a vapore, teatri, caffè viennesi, drappi della nobiltà e altre glorie passate; al racconto immersivo del presente risponde il controcanto nostalgico del mondo che fu.”
Si capisce quanto amo questo libro? 😉
La sinossi non spiega che Jan Morris era con le truppe angloamericane che entrarono a Trieste e ci liberarono dai tedeschi.
Jan si innamorò di Trieste e ci scrisse questo libro.
Edit 14-10-23 ( grazie a @Marina che vorrebbe leggerlo 😉)
Jan Morris:
“I palazzi bianchi, qua e là l'arancione ambrato dei tetti, Trieste scende con maestosa lentezza incontro al suo mare. Non è facile riconoscere i segni del suo passato, gli emblemi, le cicatrici. Il viandante tende a infondere nelle facciate, nelle piazze e nei vicoli il proprio stato d'animo. Al soffio della bora, Jan Morris ha avvertito i molteplici spiriti della città agitarsi: fiera e ambigua, squallida e aristocratica, ospitale e razzista, latina e slava, occidentale e orientale, maschile e femminile.
E mentre mette a fuoco ogni dettaglio, la memoria prende il sopravvento e rievoca navi a vapore, teatri, caffè viennesi, drappi della nobiltà e altre glorie passate; al racconto immersivo del presente risponde il controcanto nostalgico del mondo che fu.”
Si capisce quanto amo questo libro? 😉
March 5, 2022
This is like a tale of two books. First of all, I don't often read travel writing of this type, but as I love the city of Trieste and am prepping to take a group of students there next week and a former roommate left a copy of this laying around my apartment...Well, you get it.
So for the first half I was probably resisting the whole idea of such writing, hating Morris for her seeming conservative fondness and nostalgia for empire, and for writing about 90% about herself and her own feelings and only maybe 10% about Trieste. Obviously I was more interested in Trieste and less interested in Jan Morris's feelings about Trieste. Then, in the second half, she suddenly swings back around to an acceptably intelligent political-cultural-historical assessment, tells some interesting anecdotes about some interesting people and their lives in Trieste, and the book seemed to get deeper into Trieste as a place in these sections. While, in the end, most of the opinion stuff is too personal to be in any objective sense true, at least Morris is hip to her own jive enough to admit that. So it got better and I enjoyed much of the second half or thereabouts of the book.
And while I get that we write the books we want to write and say what we feel in them, I just kind of brayed at Morris's doing so in a non-fiction genre, I guess. Maybe because I don't read much non-fiction, I expected more history and less feelings about the place in a travel book. Also, if you know your reading of a place is pretty much wholly personal and subjective maybe re-write it to be less so rather than just say that you know that it's totally personal and subjective and tell your reader "Tough titty if you don't like it."
So for the first half I was probably resisting the whole idea of such writing, hating Morris for her seeming conservative fondness and nostalgia for empire, and for writing about 90% about herself and her own feelings and only maybe 10% about Trieste. Obviously I was more interested in Trieste and less interested in Jan Morris's feelings about Trieste. Then, in the second half, she suddenly swings back around to an acceptably intelligent political-cultural-historical assessment, tells some interesting anecdotes about some interesting people and their lives in Trieste, and the book seemed to get deeper into Trieste as a place in these sections. While, in the end, most of the opinion stuff is too personal to be in any objective sense true, at least Morris is hip to her own jive enough to admit that. So it got better and I enjoyed much of the second half or thereabouts of the book.
And while I get that we write the books we want to write and say what we feel in them, I just kind of brayed at Morris's doing so in a non-fiction genre, I guess. Maybe because I don't read much non-fiction, I expected more history and less feelings about the place in a travel book. Also, if you know your reading of a place is pretty much wholly personal and subjective maybe re-write it to be less so rather than just say that you know that it's totally personal and subjective and tell your reader "Tough titty if you don't like it."
November 25, 2020
Trieste es una ciudad literaria de las que nunca se acaban. Por allí sabía que habían asesinado a Winckelmann, que Stendhal estuvo unos meses haciendo como que era cónsul, que Joyce escribió ‘Dublineses’ y comenzó el ‘Ulysses’ mientras comentaba cosas con Svevo y aprendía el triestino y su mezcla de palabras de varios idiomas. Incluso aún hoy día puede visitarse la librería de Umberto Saba (juraría que la llevaba cuando estuve un sobrino-nieto) o puede verse a Claudio Magris tomando café en el de San Marco. Pero lo que no sabía es que sir Richard Burton había sido también cónsul británico allí y como ya estaba algo mayor y se aburría (Jan Morris dice que era un poco luciferino) se dedicó a traducir las ‘Mil y una noches’ al inglés, a anotar el texto con sus comentarios e imagino que a recomendar al ilustrador Albert Letchford, que también vivía en Trieste, para su maravillosa edición. En parte trabajó en el libro en una especie de posada que se encuentra o encontraba en Opicina, una localidad muy cercana a la ciudad pero en lo alto del Carso, desde donde ya se pasa andando a Eslovenia. Es curioso que eligiera ese sitio, con un pie en oriente y otro en occidente, para esto. Morris dice que la posada estaba abandonada aunque tenía una placa sobre sir Richard cuando ella anduvo por allí. Esperemos que siga en pie.
November 21, 2024
5/5. Jan Morris je že ob pisanju knjige med leti 1999 in 2001 postregla s podatkom, da več kot tri četrtine anketiranih Italijanov ni vedelo, da je Trst "njihovo" mesto. Če bi ga nam lastna in pravšnja ignoranca "zgodovinila", bi pristal točno tam, kjer je sedaj - nikjer. Preden ga je zgodovina zreducirala na topos geostrateških in političnih preračunavanj, je bilo povsem "nezapomenljivo" mimobežno trgovsko in migrantsko vozlišče, kraj slovesovanj, usodnih podpisov in pisateljskih inspiracij. Imeli so ga radi vsi in hkrati noben. A vsi so odšli.
April 9, 2022
Read while in Trieste.
May 1, 2024
La menos italiana de la ciudades de Italia, austrohúngara hasta la médula. Un pasaje delicioso sobre una ciudad melancólica como ninguna.
August 26, 2015
If you've done a bit of traveling, unless you live in an overimagined place like Venice or Vegas, Paris or London, chances are you've at some point been asked to describe your home city. Travelers are bicurious little insects: always already planning their next trip. It's a difficult task, more difficult then you would think pre-question, perhaps. Because how do you tease out the loose bricks in the pavement, the minuscule scratchings on the wall, the things that explain what it's like to actually walk around a place. “Sometimes I am buying a newspaper in a strange city,” the poet David Berman once wrote, “and think 'I am about to learn what it's like to live here.'” Perhaps the loose bricks are like that paper, its articles often feeling more like gossip than news.
Which is to say intimate, in a way.
I myself live in Leiden, The Netherlands, and when I'm queried to describe it, I often make do by saying it's “like Amsterdam, but smaller and quieter.” Just as beautiful, I might sometimes add as an afterthought, but I know people wouldn't believe me, and will probably never visit anyway. And often after saying such I'd feel bad. Leiden does actually happen to be a beautiful city, but even if it hadn't been, I feel like you always owe your hometown a bit more credit than to be crassly defined against a better-known neighbor.
The problem is we are often not consciously aware of these loose bricks in the pavement. We walk them but don't talk them. So when I want to define Leiden on its own terms, I will mumble something about “oldest Dutch university,” which is true, but has very little to do with what it's like to be here. Facts of paper, not of life.
It probably takes both an original mind and lots of training to actually manage this feat then, and if anyone qualifies, it is Jan Morris. She has written books about too many cities to name (Venice being perhaps the most famous example) and articles or stories on many more still. Nevertheless, she is at pains to clarify that Trieste is not just another town for her. The book was released as her final say, the last book she would ever write. When she was still a he called James, and Europe was licking its wounds from the Second World War, Morris was stationed in Trieste, and s/he describes his time in the city as happening through the same kind of haze as the dust clouds that took so long to drift from our European skies. For this is what Morris goes on to describe: not the facts – the city's status as the primary port of the Habsburg Empire, its glory days, its overflowing bank accounts – but its lifeblood, “a solitary man sitting on a float that never bobs”. And this is what that life is, so wonderfully evoked, that I will have to quote at length:
There is a lot of truth to those words of Musil at the end. For isn't that what the literary world entails, to some extent? A kind of collective agreement that we can push this word <> meaning thing perpetually onwards. Morris of course is more than anyone aware of the dangers of trying too hard to define a place. Somewhere, in a passage I can't seem to find anymore, she warns of the dangers of anthropomorphising a city. Inherently in writing about anything, we have to talk about other things, things that are not the subject, to describe it, while still purporting to talk about the thing we wanted to talk about in the first place. It's a kind of doublespeak. We incessantly borrow words to stand for other words, words that they're not. Because ultimately, the only word with which to accurately describe Trieste is the word Trieste. Morris knows this too, and when all is said and done, she might be most on point, perhaps even most poetic, when she concludes that “Trieste is an existentialist sort of place. Its purpose is to be itself.”
Which is to say intimate, in a way.
I myself live in Leiden, The Netherlands, and when I'm queried to describe it, I often make do by saying it's “like Amsterdam, but smaller and quieter.” Just as beautiful, I might sometimes add as an afterthought, but I know people wouldn't believe me, and will probably never visit anyway. And often after saying such I'd feel bad. Leiden does actually happen to be a beautiful city, but even if it hadn't been, I feel like you always owe your hometown a bit more credit than to be crassly defined against a better-known neighbor.
The problem is we are often not consciously aware of these loose bricks in the pavement. We walk them but don't talk them. So when I want to define Leiden on its own terms, I will mumble something about “oldest Dutch university,” which is true, but has very little to do with what it's like to be here. Facts of paper, not of life.
It probably takes both an original mind and lots of training to actually manage this feat then, and if anyone qualifies, it is Jan Morris. She has written books about too many cities to name (Venice being perhaps the most famous example) and articles or stories on many more still. Nevertheless, she is at pains to clarify that Trieste is not just another town for her. The book was released as her final say, the last book she would ever write. When she was still a he called James, and Europe was licking its wounds from the Second World War, Morris was stationed in Trieste, and s/he describes his time in the city as happening through the same kind of haze as the dust clouds that took so long to drift from our European skies. For this is what Morris goes on to describe: not the facts – the city's status as the primary port of the Habsburg Empire, its glory days, its overflowing bank accounts – but its lifeblood, “a solitary man sitting on a float that never bobs”. And this is what that life is, so wonderfully evoked, that I will have to quote at length:
The Trieste effect, I call it. It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere.
I am not the first to associate the city with nowhereness. The Viennese playwright Hermann Bahr, arriving there in 1909, said he felt as though he was suspended in unreality, as if he were 'nowhere at all'. Trieste is a highly subjective sort of place, and often inspires such fancies. People who have never been there generally don't know where it is. Visitors tend to leave it puzzled, and when they get home, remember it with a vague sense of mystery, something they can't put a finger on. Those who know it better often seem to see it figuratively, not just as a city but as an idea of a city, and it appears to have a particular influence upon those of us with a weakness for allegory – that is to say, as the Austrian Robert Musil once put it, those of us who suppose everything to mean more than it has any honest claim to mean.
There is a lot of truth to those words of Musil at the end. For isn't that what the literary world entails, to some extent? A kind of collective agreement that we can push this word <> meaning thing perpetually onwards. Morris of course is more than anyone aware of the dangers of trying too hard to define a place. Somewhere, in a passage I can't seem to find anymore, she warns of the dangers of anthropomorphising a city. Inherently in writing about anything, we have to talk about other things, things that are not the subject, to describe it, while still purporting to talk about the thing we wanted to talk about in the first place. It's a kind of doublespeak. We incessantly borrow words to stand for other words, words that they're not. Because ultimately, the only word with which to accurately describe Trieste is the word Trieste. Morris knows this too, and when all is said and done, she might be most on point, perhaps even most poetic, when she concludes that “Trieste is an existentialist sort of place. Its purpose is to be itself.”
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