Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere - Hardcover

Morris, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743201280 ISBN 13: 9780743201285

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Synopsis

The travel author and historian journeys to the beguiling city of Trieste, Italy, which has enchanted her for more than fifty years, to explore issues of patriotism, decency, wildness, and sex.

About this title

About the Author

Jan Morris has written more than thirty books on the British Empire, Europe, Venice, Oxford, Sydney, Hong Kong, Man-hattan and Wales, as well as six volumes of collected essays and two autobiographical works. Her novel, Last Letters from Hav, was a finalist for the Booker Prize. She is an honorary D.Litt. of the universities of Wales and Glamorgan, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She lives in Wales.

Reviews

With fluid, expressive prose, Welsh writer Morris (Lincoln) delivers an intriguing vision of the small seaside Italian city of Trieste. In an account that is part detailed history, part melancholy remembrance, Morris offers a vivid and loving description of a place and an eloquent reflection on growing old. In this slim volume, supposedly Morris's last, the author brilliantly weaves historic and personal memories (as the soldier James Morris, before her sex-change operation, she was stationed there during WWII), observations on love, lust, nationalism, exile and kindness, and a tender portrait of the oft-forgotten city. From glory to exile, from affluence to desertion, Morris shares the city's triumphs and hardships as one would the life story of an old and well-loved friend with affection, respect and a cheerful acceptance of little personality quirks. Tossed between Italy, Austria, Yugoslavia and finally back to Italy, Trieste, once one of the greatest port cities in the world, is now a sleepy town on the "end of its Italian umbilical." Morris writes, "So it is with me, after a lifetime of describing the planet, and I look at Trieste now as I would look into a mirror.... Much of this little book, then, has been a self-description." Populated with the well-drawn ghosts of such luminaries as James Joyce, Sir Richard Francis Burton and other "exiles" who made the city their home for a time, Morris's "little book" is as exuberant as it is bittersweet, as resigned as it is wistful.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

What gives a city its character? What is the quality of its attractions? A century ago, Trieste was the major port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; now it is attempting to remake itself as a vibrant center of science and tourism in northern Italy. But in her forty-fifth—and, she claims, last—book Morris fondly describes Trieste as "the capital of nowhere," arguing that the city's very name connotes "the visceral, the surreal, the lonely, the hypochondriac, the self-centred and the affectionate." The noted Welsh travel writer and transsexual, who first visited Trieste as a young soldier in 1946 and last as an elderly woman, plumbs the mysteries of the city's melancholy, and the result is a meditation on the locus of the self and its confabulation of psychic history and accidents of geography.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

An opening quote from Wallace Stevens "I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself" sets the tone of this philosophical travel memoir. Morris, who has declared this book her last, is the author of more than 30 books (e.g., Last Letters from Hav), an honorary D. Litt. from the University of Wales, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In this love letter to Trieste a city she has grown to love over the years and never got tired of exploring Morris looks back on her life. She recalls first coming to Trieste as a soldier [male] in World War II and discusses the impact the city's way of life has had on her own philosophy of life. Each chapter begins with a philosophical quote stating its theme and setting the atmosphere. Morris is not only skilled at vividly describing townspeople and buildings in a way that brings Trieste to life, but she also successfully balances the personal with the historical by providing references to both history and literature. Intriguing and fun to read, this is recommended for public libraries. Stephanie Papa, Baltimore Cty. Circuit Court Law Lib., MD
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* The highly regarded Welsh biographer and travel writer insists that this is her last book, which, if true, means that Morris is going out with a bang. In writing about the Italian city of Trieste, she shows to shimmering advantage her singular skill at evoking place. Morris visited and familiarized herself with Trieste several decades ago, and she remained haunted by it. What made her recent return trip there so particularly poignant was that Trieste's evident and deep-seated sense of the past corresponded with Morris' own personal sense of the passage of time: of "lost consequence and faded power." As she walks the streets of modern Trieste, her keen sense of history guides her. No matter where Morris perambulates in today's Trieste--no matter what modern structures loom before her--she is still most sensitive to the "imperial breezes" that sweep out of history from back when Trieste, then part of the Austrian empire, was transformed from a fishing town into Austria's only international seaport and the quarters of the imperial Austrian navy. Contemporary Trieste is a place of "uneasy" climate, a community seeking a new purpose, and a spot with a checkered sense of nationality. For Morris, it is also a city where, more so than any other place she's known, she "remembers lost times, lost chances, lost friends." Most important for her devoted readers, she articulates her feelings about it in sublime prose. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: A City Down the Hill

If you come to it by car over the Karst, all the same, Trieste looks perfectly self-explanatory. The road crosses the border out of Slovenia and reaches the village of Opicina, where the plateau abruptly falls away through pine-woods towards the sea. There, a tall obelisk marks the beginning of the city. It was erected in 1830 to commemorate the completion of the first proper highroad across the Karst, connecting Vienna with its seaport on the Adriatic. Now the monument is peeling and neglected, and its setting is suburban, but when it was new, it told the grateful traveller that his journey across the wasteland was over, and he was reaching a haven of imperial order -- an up-to-date Mediterranean outpost of the empire of the Habsburgs. The young Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Joseph Maximilian came this way in 1850 and thought the Karst a cursed desert, but he saw the distant appearance of the obelisk as a symbol of hope, and urged his coachman to get a move on.

For me an element of hope is the essence of cityness, and when I see a city in the distance, out of the open country, I always get a move on myself. The more isolated the city, the more hopeful, because then it offers a more spectacular contrast to the bucolic world outside. Until lately the cycle of the countryside was regular and foreseeable, governed by the seasons and the primeval needs of agriculture: the harvests came and went, the lambs were born and slaughtered, sowing and reaping, calving and hay-making -- day after day, year after year, the dutiful round proceeded. All being well, there were no surprises. Even the advent of silage and artificial fertilizers, even the prospect of genetic interference, has not yet freed rural living from its age-old routines. Winter or summer, rain or shine, sharp at six o'clock every morning of his life my neighbour Alwyn Parry drives up our lane in his pickup to prepare the cows for milking.

But the city! There matters change by the hour, and people too. The city bursts with ideas as with traffic, a swirl of newness and surprise. Who can be bored in a city? If you are tired of one activity you can try something else, change your job, take your custom to another restaurant. Most human progress has been engendered in cities. While the farmer ploughed his same old furrow, supervised by priest and landlord, and succeeded when the time came by sons and grandsons, away in the city people were devising new ways of living, dressing, thinking, eating and believing. "Had I but plenty of money" the poet said (Browning again)/"Money enough and to spare/The house for me, no doubt, were a house in a city square./Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!" I agree with him, lifelong country-dweller though I am. In our own times urbanism has begun to overwhelm the rural way of things, but there is still enough disparity between town and country to make me prod my postilion when I see a city down the hill.

...

Surreal? Hypochondriac? Subliminal? Surely not. Our first sight of Trieste from the Opicina obelisk, high on the ridge above the city limits, is as reassuring now as it was in Maximilian's time. The city sprawls before us apparently explicit and composed, and its setting is superb. If the weather is fine we can see it all, there and then, like a diagram of its history. Trieste lies around two bays, the bay of Trieste to the north, the bay of Muggia to the south, separated by a promontory -- The Promontory, Triestini used to call it. The coastline stretches away towards Split and Croatia one way, towards Venice and Italy the other, with the blue hilly outline of Istria to the south, the flat shore of Friuli-Venezia Giulia to the north and west. Often this tremendous scene is blurred -- by rain or fog in the winter, by heat-haze in the high summer -- but sometimes it is almost preternaturally clear, and then one can fancy a flash of sunshine from the golden domes of San Marco in Venice, seventy miles away across the waters.

On a little hill below us, beside Trieste's northern bay, stands the original walled settlement of the city, known to the Illyrians, the Romans and the Venetians. It has a cathedral and a citadel upon its summit, a Roman amphitheatre in its flank, and its medieval tumble of streets is still recognizable, running down to the waterfront -- the pattern of the small fortified port that grew out of Tergeste, and was perhaps rather like a less formidable Dubrovnik. Nowadays Trieste's Old City is partly obliterated by modern development, partly dingy with age, partly prettied up, and has lost most of its ancient pride; but beside and around it, overpowering its consequence, is the city the Habsburgs built as their imperial port.

The prospect of this other Trieste, much of it gleaming new in Maximilian's day, must have cheered him up with its promise of white tablecloths and decent beds. This was a universal compensation of imperialism, and his contemporaries in British India found their spirits similarly rising when their trains drew into Bombay or Lahore out of the endless Indian plains. "See you at the Club!" they cried to each other in relief, as they hurried off to their hansom cabs, and Maximilian, after a look at the view from the Obelisk (which still gets a capital O in Trieste), doubtless hastened back to his carriage, shuffling the leaves from his boots, in the same expectant frame of mind. There in the lee of a wilderness Habsburg Trieste was built, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with all urban refinements. Its design was logical, its buildings were substantial, its streets were spacious, its manner was amply complacent, for it was a mercantile city, a port city, built for the job. It was not primarily concerned with politics, grace or leisure, like its architectural contemporaries St. Petersburg, Calcutta or Bath. Hard work and enterprise were its hallmarks, but its builders knew that creature comfort was next to profitability. It was a thoroughly modern and efficient urban machine.

Today both old and new Trieste are invested by industrial works and nondescript suburbs of the last century, but from Opicina an imaginative eye can still see their first relationship -- an imperial relationship again, one settlement vastly dominating the other. The one is still cramped beneath its castle, vestigially walled: the other confidently faces the sea, with quays and jetties all along its waterfront, a grand splash of a piazza opening directly upon the Adriatic, and a lighthouse on a mole enclosing the harbour. The little medieval town has a certain delicacy to its muddle; the big Habsburg city has no subtlety, only measured swank. From one you might hear the music of lutes and madrigals, from the other oom-pah-pah. For a contemporary parallel you have only to go down the holiday coast into Croatia, where proud old Venetian cities are awash in concrete hotels and camping sites: but again the contrast would be familiar enough to officers of British India, because the complex alleys of castellan Trieste stand amidst the symmetry of the Austrian city rather like an Indian bazaar town beside a neat and whitewashed cantonment of the Raj.

Yet time and setting have made a unity of them (as they often have of the bazaar and the cantonment, and even of the camp-sites and the campaniles). At the start of the twenty-first century there are few modern structures down there, by the standards of most European cities. Trieste was not badly damaged by the wars, and high-rise buildings are rare -- local guidebooks call a six-storey structure a grattacielo, a skyscraper. If we look selectively enough towards the city centre we still see much of what Maximilian saw, except that in his day the northern bay down there, the bay of Trieste, was massed with masts and riggings, and there were ships tied up at all those jetties, steamboats coming and going and wagons rumbling along cobbled piers. "All motion and animation," Maximilian thought it then. If a warship of the Imperial Navy sailed in she was greeted with a gun-salute from the castle, and a muffled echo would reach up here to the Obelisk 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.

Copyright © 2001 by Jan Morris

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743201280
• ISBN 13: 9780743201285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208