Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere Read Free Page A

itself.
    Today that bay is more subdued. Farther away from us a new port has arisen, around the promontory in Muggia bay, and we can see tankers and container vessels moored there, or coming in and out: but immediately below us the central waterfront of Trieste, during a few grand generations the sea-gate of an empire, is likely to be without any ships at all.
    FOR THE view from the Obelisk is hallucinatory, like our glimpse of Venice in the sunshine. Only for a century or so was Habsburg Trieste as assured as it looks from the hill. It was an ad hoc port, deliberately chosen and developed for imperial purposes, and ports are more vulnerable than most cities to the vagaries of history. Across the world we may see famous old havens now neglected or debased, sometimes simply because modern ships need deeper water or different facilities, but sometimes because their fundamental purpose has been lost. Everywhere once vigorous waterfront areas have been emasculated or mutated, with reconstituted flagstones and fancy fittings, warehouses turned into trendy apartments, novelty shops smelling of pot-pourri, dry docks filled in for more office space. The quays where the lovely clippers berthed in Manhattan now form a maritime museum. The docks in London where the East Indiamen unloaded their jutes and spices have been turned into Docklands, a grim modish city of corporations. Bristol and Liverpool, once great bases of the Atlantic trade, now find themselves on the wrong side of Britain for the European markets, just as one day Hong Kong may wish it were on the mainland of China after all. Nearly everywhere the jumble of port life, with all its stinks, noises and clashing colours, has been removed from city centres, and so from the public consciousness.
    Much of this happened to Trieste too, abruptly before its time. The port was not outmoded in any technical sense. It was simply made irrelevant by the collapse of the empire that created it, and it has never been the same again. Empires come and go, and their functions go with them. There may be a vessel or two down there—a warship perhaps, a car-ferry, a tug, a tourist hydrofoil—and we can see the usual conglomeration of yachts and launches in the inevitable city marina. But the bay of Trieste looks a regretful bay. It can never be what it was, and reminds us from the start, as I was first reminded half a century ago, that this city was built to a lost purpose.
    Trieste awaits us notwithstanding. “Hurry up, coachman,” Maximilian calls as his carriage pulls away from the Obelisk, “the Governor is expecting us for dinner.” We ourselves just press the accelerator, remembering that we haven’t got a hotel reservation. Whichever century we inhabit, down we go, down the hairpin bends from Opicina, our leather seats creaking or our plastic dashboards rattling, down from the Karst into the grey streets of Trieste (or Triest, as the Austrians spell it, or Trst as the Slovenes prefer, and the Croats down the road).

TWO

Preferring a Blur
    We need not really hurry. His Excellency the Governor is of course honoured to receive the Archduke any time he arrives in the city, and we shall find that there are plenty of vacancies at the Albergo Ducha d’Aosta. Trieste can be a bewildering city, but it is habitually free of hassle. You can drift through this place, thinking about something else, as easily as anywhere in Europe. Its traffic generally stops for you at pedestrian crossings. Its buskers and beggars thank you politely if you give them something, and do not reproach you if you decline. Everyone seems pleased to be helpful.
    It is not, mind you, a city made for pedants: the shop you want has probably adjourned for the holidays, the museum is temporarily closed for refurbishing, you’ve just missed the bus owing to schedule changes, the gallery is not in the telephone book and opens only in the summer season. But for the drifter it is just right. Even in the 1900s, when Trieste