Trieste as Cultural Nexus (rather than “nowhere”)

When Jan Morris opens her 2001 Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere with the phrase, “I cannot always see Trieste in my mind’s eye,” I feel bad for her. When she adds, rhetorically, it seems, “Who can?” I want to object, “Well, I can!”

Probably the difference in our perceptions comes from how each of us first encountered the city. She seems to have landed here mostly by accident, as a result of the winds of World War II, the uncertainties of a world in complete flux. By contrast, I chose this place and came to it on purpose. The world was in flux — again or still is hard to tell — the closest war in European experience was the one across the border in former Yugoslavia, devastating, but hardly the world engulfing phenomenon that had brought her here fifty years before.

As a result of her first encounter, when she looks back later, examining her own responses, she writes,

an unspecified yearning steals narcotically over me—what the Welsh language, in a well-loved word, calls hiraeth. Pathos is part of it, but in a lyrical form to which I am sentimentally susceptible, and at the same time I am excited by a suggestion of sensual desire. The allure of lost consequence and faded power is seducing me, the passing of time, the passing of friends, the scrapping of great ships! In sum I feel that this opaque seaport of my vision, so full of sweet melancholy, illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations too. (16-17)

Such a fine portrait and such a wondrous invitation to join her! I wish I could. It’s just not what the place makes me feel.

Where she sees uncertainty in the city’s historical ambiguity and interprets it as “an allegory of limbo,” I see a kind of prescient groundedness in its unusual insistence on mixture, its fashioning of itself — for this mythos was built over time — as a place characterized by a distinctive blend of languages and cultures. Triestine authors, artists, and intellectuals have embraced this ethos for several generations. The city has even come to brand itself in such terms, while the characterization of Trieste as a border city, a polyglot city, a cosmopolitan, international cross-roads of multiplicity and mélange in music, in cuisine, sensibility, and identity has become so common as to be almost a cliché.

Many locals see it as precisely this, a 100-year-old cliché of Triestine life. And this, I say, is an extraordinary thing. It is why I sought it out in the first place. And why, I suspect, I can always see it so clearly in my mind’s eye.