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ELEGY ON THE ADRIATIC
By JIM LEWIS, MARCH 25, 2011
One morning, about a century ago, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was visiting his friend, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, in her seaside castle at Duino, just west of Trieste. He was 36, broke, blocked, disconsolate and sickly, a saturnine man contemplating his fears and failures. Perhaps the princess had business elsewhere; perhaps she understood a poet’s need for solitude; perhaps he was merely bad company. In any case, she left the castle, while Rilke remained, watched over by a staff who must have found him odd, at best. It was January, and Trieste’s furious Bora wind was blowing; nevertheless, he liked to walk along the cliffs overlooking the Adriatic. On one such occasion, he was brooding about money, as writers will, when his thoughts were interrupted by a voice emerging from the gale: “Who, if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?”
That phrase, word for word as dictated, begins the “Duino Elegies,” among the most estimable long poems of the 20th century. And that story, recounted by the princess in her letters and repeated in almost every account of Rilke’s life, sums up much that’s distinct and singular about Trieste and its environs: its isolation, wedged as it is on the far eastern coast of Italy, between a steep limestone escarpment and the deep blue sea; its fierce weather mitigated by solid comforts; its muted splendor; and its reputation as a haven for distinguished exiles, outsiders and eccentrics — especially writers, of whom Trieste has hosted a great many.
Aside from Rilke, there was Casanova, whose memoirs end with his sojourn in Trieste, and Stendahl, who served as a consul here, as did Richard Burton (the half-mad explorer, not the actor), who disliked the place and bided his time by translating the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the pioneering German art historian, died here — murdered by a robber in his hotel room. At the age of 20, Freud spent some time in the city, dissecting eels as part of his medical training. The poet Filippo Marinetti started his Futurist movement here, with an evening of theater, readings, manifestos and mayhem. James Joyce accomplished most of his life’s work while teaching English to Triestini, and Italo Svevo was born and raised here. The great travel essayist Jan Morris chose Trieste as the subject of her final book, and its subtitle — “The Meaning of Nowhere” — perhaps gives some insight into why, of all these figures, only Svevo was a local. Trieste is where you go to reinvent yourself, to be left alone, if you want — or not, if you don’t.
It hosts a massive port but has none of a port city’s usual fare of sin and swagger. Instead, it’s a city of cafes (coffee production is a main industry in Trieste): they are everywhere and constantly crowded with conversation — and in several different languages, for there are still Austrians living here, as well as Serbs, Croats, Turks and Greeks. The local dialect, Triestine, is a hodgepodge of Italian and various imported languages. Stroll around for a few days and you begin to notice it: a constant stream of chatter, argument, gossip, running from noon to night, conducted mostly by amiable young crowds. It’s a city for flâneurs, made for walking, for poking around, stopping in, moving on, for lightheartedness and romance. (You see couples smooching everywhere — in the squares, in the cafes, on the long concrete pier that extends out into the sea.)
Mention the city’s name to anyone who travels, and they’ll almost certainly have heard of it — and perhaps even know a few things about it, because it was once an emblem of a now disintegrated empire, because Joyce appended its name to the end of “Ulysses” (he wrote much of the novel here), because it appears in books of European history. It’s a city that seems to exist in a different century, a reminder of past glories, long forgotten — like Yalta or Marienbad.
It is essentially an Austro-Hungarian city with an Italian-speaking majority, built up as a Mediterranean port by the Hapsburgs at the height of their empire, ceded to Italy in 1919, occupied by the Germans in 1943, transformed into a semiautonomous city-state after the war and returned to Italy in 1954. Thus it remains: a small realm (the population is about 200,000) on the far easternmost point of the Adriatic coast, perched on a tiny sliver of land virtually surrounded by Slovenia, a happy mongrel made up of echt-Austrian architecture (complete with that curious, mustard-colored paint of which the Austrians seem so fond), some Slavic faces and food from just about everywhere. A curious, anomalous place; and so I went, and discovered one of my favorite cities in the world.
It felt like a discovery, anyway, and certainly I’m not the first to experience it that way. Even the locals feel pleasantly isolated from the world outside. One night I found myself sitting outdoors at a restaurant, talking to a young Italian man I’d just met about why we liked the place so much. He had grown up there, he told me, and then moved to Milan. “Too busy, too noisy, too dirty,” he said, frowning in distaste; so he came home. He was a businessman of some sort, in his mid-30s, I’d guess; I wrote all his facts down, but some time earlier the chef had brought us a bottle of aquavit of which he was justly proud. We went at that for a while, and the next morning I couldn’t read my own handwriting. In any case, the businessman told me, he didn’t intend to move away again. He asked me if I was enjoying my stay, and I said, “Yes, very much.” He smiled, as if he knew this, and asked me why. “It’s so lovely,” I said. “It’s quiet and . . . decent. And best of all, it’s so. . . . ” “Hidden,” he said, and I said, “Yes. It’s like a European Shangri-La.”
It’s this near-magical combination of legend and invisibility that explains why, of all European cities of repute, Trieste seems the least spoiled. I visited during the high season, stopped in Venice along the way and found the latter city unbearably crowded, beset by roving gangs of sightseers. As I drove down the cliffs toward Trieste, only 70 miles east, they seemed to disappear, and by the time I arrived in town there was hardly a tourist to be found — and this despite its shoreline, its delightful warrens of streets and alleys, its magnificent plazas and lovely parks. My hotel was as enviously located as any I’ve ever seen: it made up one side of the enormous Piazza Unità d’Italia, a magnificent central square that opens onto the Adriatic and serves as the city’s main gathering place. Returning to my room at night, I could look out on the vast expanse of marble and masonry and watch what seemed like the entire city, chatting well into the night; but I encountered no other guests, aside from a group of bicyclists who arrived one morning and left the next. The tiny parking lot at the Duino Castle was only about half full, though it’s a spectacular place, perched precipitously on a bluff outside of town.
There were no more than a half dozen people wandering around the Miramare Castle, a small, lovely residence overlooking the city that was conceived in the mid-19th century by the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph. A story: He’d hoped to retire there with his beloved wife, Carlotta; instead, he was pressed into an appointment as emperor of Mexico, a bizarre and preposterous episode that ended when he was captured and executed by Benito Juárez. He never had a chance to live in the castle; instead, the hapless Carlotta, insane with grief, occupied the place alone and in seclusion.
I would say you can’t make this stuff up; but you can, and if you can, Trieste is a place to do it. There are many cities in the world that are made for painters and painting; there are cities for filmmakers, for music, for ballet. But there are no particular cities for writers and poets; the occupation is too solitary, its audience too amorphous. Or perhaps there is one, this one, Trieste — a city made for talking, thinking, writing, wandering. A city for storytellers and makers of verse.
That phrase, word for word as dictated, begins the “Duino Elegies,” among the most estimable long poems of the 20th century. And that story, recounted by the princess in her letters and repeated in almost every account of Rilke’s life, sums up much that’s distinct and singular about Trieste and its environs: its isolation, wedged as it is on the far eastern coast of Italy, between a steep limestone escarpment and the deep blue sea; its fierce weather mitigated by solid comforts; its muted splendor; and its reputation as a haven for distinguished exiles, outsiders and eccentrics — especially writers, of whom Trieste has hosted a great many.
Aside from Rilke, there was Casanova, whose memoirs end with his sojourn in Trieste, and Stendahl, who served as a consul here, as did Richard Burton (the half-mad explorer, not the actor), who disliked the place and bided his time by translating the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the pioneering German art historian, died here — murdered by a robber in his hotel room. At the age of 20, Freud spent some time in the city, dissecting eels as part of his medical training. The poet Filippo Marinetti started his Futurist movement here, with an evening of theater, readings, manifestos and mayhem. James Joyce accomplished most of his life’s work while teaching English to Triestini, and Italo Svevo was born and raised here. The great travel essayist Jan Morris chose Trieste as the subject of her final book, and its subtitle — “The Meaning of Nowhere” — perhaps gives some insight into why, of all these figures, only Svevo was a local. Trieste is where you go to reinvent yourself, to be left alone, if you want — or not, if you don’t.
It hosts a massive port but has none of a port city’s usual fare of sin and swagger. Instead, it’s a city of cafes (coffee production is a main industry in Trieste): they are everywhere and constantly crowded with conversation — and in several different languages, for there are still Austrians living here, as well as Serbs, Croats, Turks and Greeks. The local dialect, Triestine, is a hodgepodge of Italian and various imported languages. Stroll around for a few days and you begin to notice it: a constant stream of chatter, argument, gossip, running from noon to night, conducted mostly by amiable young crowds. It’s a city for flâneurs, made for walking, for poking around, stopping in, moving on, for lightheartedness and romance. (You see couples smooching everywhere — in the squares, in the cafes, on the long concrete pier that extends out into the sea.)
Mention the city’s name to anyone who travels, and they’ll almost certainly have heard of it — and perhaps even know a few things about it, because it was once an emblem of a now disintegrated empire, because Joyce appended its name to the end of “Ulysses” (he wrote much of the novel here), because it appears in books of European history. It’s a city that seems to exist in a different century, a reminder of past glories, long forgotten — like Yalta or Marienbad.
It is essentially an Austro-Hungarian city with an Italian-speaking majority, built up as a Mediterranean port by the Hapsburgs at the height of their empire, ceded to Italy in 1919, occupied by the Germans in 1943, transformed into a semiautonomous city-state after the war and returned to Italy in 1954. Thus it remains: a small realm (the population is about 200,000) on the far easternmost point of the Adriatic coast, perched on a tiny sliver of land virtually surrounded by Slovenia, a happy mongrel made up of echt-Austrian architecture (complete with that curious, mustard-colored paint of which the Austrians seem so fond), some Slavic faces and food from just about everywhere. A curious, anomalous place; and so I went, and discovered one of my favorite cities in the world.
It felt like a discovery, anyway, and certainly I’m not the first to experience it that way. Even the locals feel pleasantly isolated from the world outside. One night I found myself sitting outdoors at a restaurant, talking to a young Italian man I’d just met about why we liked the place so much. He had grown up there, he told me, and then moved to Milan. “Too busy, too noisy, too dirty,” he said, frowning in distaste; so he came home. He was a businessman of some sort, in his mid-30s, I’d guess; I wrote all his facts down, but some time earlier the chef had brought us a bottle of aquavit of which he was justly proud. We went at that for a while, and the next morning I couldn’t read my own handwriting. In any case, the businessman told me, he didn’t intend to move away again. He asked me if I was enjoying my stay, and I said, “Yes, very much.” He smiled, as if he knew this, and asked me why. “It’s so lovely,” I said. “It’s quiet and . . . decent. And best of all, it’s so. . . . ” “Hidden,” he said, and I said, “Yes. It’s like a European Shangri-La.”
It’s this near-magical combination of legend and invisibility that explains why, of all European cities of repute, Trieste seems the least spoiled. I visited during the high season, stopped in Venice along the way and found the latter city unbearably crowded, beset by roving gangs of sightseers. As I drove down the cliffs toward Trieste, only 70 miles east, they seemed to disappear, and by the time I arrived in town there was hardly a tourist to be found — and this despite its shoreline, its delightful warrens of streets and alleys, its magnificent plazas and lovely parks. My hotel was as enviously located as any I’ve ever seen: it made up one side of the enormous Piazza Unità d’Italia, a magnificent central square that opens onto the Adriatic and serves as the city’s main gathering place. Returning to my room at night, I could look out on the vast expanse of marble and masonry and watch what seemed like the entire city, chatting well into the night; but I encountered no other guests, aside from a group of bicyclists who arrived one morning and left the next. The tiny parking lot at the Duino Castle was only about half full, though it’s a spectacular place, perched precipitously on a bluff outside of town.
There were no more than a half dozen people wandering around the Miramare Castle, a small, lovely residence overlooking the city that was conceived in the mid-19th century by the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph. A story: He’d hoped to retire there with his beloved wife, Carlotta; instead, he was pressed into an appointment as emperor of Mexico, a bizarre and preposterous episode that ended when he was captured and executed by Benito Juárez. He never had a chance to live in the castle; instead, the hapless Carlotta, insane with grief, occupied the place alone and in seclusion.
I would say you can’t make this stuff up; but you can, and if you can, Trieste is a place to do it. There are many cities in the world that are made for painters and painting; there are cities for filmmakers, for music, for ballet. But there are no particular cities for writers and poets; the occupation is too solitary, its audience too amorphous. Or perhaps there is one, this one, Trieste — a city made for talking, thinking, writing, wandering. A city for storytellers and makers of verse.
I loved it immediately. I’m going back as soon as I can.
trovo l'articolo molto interessante, però non so se tutti i triestini conoscono la lingua inglese. forse sarebbe opportuno inserire anche la traduzione in italiano. la ringrazio
RispondiEliminaCerco di provvedere. Grazie a lei.
RispondiEliminavisto che provvederete ad inserire la traduzione in italiano, potete inserire anche quella in sloveno, visto che l'articolo parla anche del Carso?
RispondiElimina"provvederete" chi...? Comunque non sono in grado di tradurre in sloveno. Nè in tedesco, per quanto nell'articolo si citi l'Austria. Però se vuole può fare lei le traduzioni e inviarmele. Le pubblicherò volentieri.
RispondiElimina