Europe > Italy > Friuli-Venezia Giulia > Trieste > Articles > Trieste: The Ghost of Empire Past

I’ve long been susceptible to the celluloid version of Italy: in this idealised country, everything is gold tinted and lovely, like deep fried zucchini flowers or Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in The Talented Mr Ripley. There is only one car, the Fiat 500, and it is always parked sideways. Guaglione is forever number one in the hit parade and Anita Ekberg is eternally voluptuous, but damp, in one of those bleach-scented Roman fountains.

But then, in the early spring, I came to Trieste and saw green loden jackets and tall blonde people and signs advertising beer instead of Campari, and realized the fantasies had been mysteriously transposed. Expecting Roman Holiday or La Dolce Vita, I’d somehow wandered into The Sound of Music. And if I hadn’t known I was on former Austrian territory I might have been confused.

In place of happy fishermen singing Santa Lucia or black-clad crones heading to mass, I found instead the half-digested remains of a heterogeneous, Habsburg past. The centre of town is called the Borgo Teresiano after the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who ordered it to be built in the first place.

Geographically the city barely counts as Italy, attached as it is by the thinnest of umbilical cords to the rest of the country. The villages on all sides are ethnically Slovenian and if the names aren’t enough of a giveaway – Basovizza, Opicina, Gabrovizza - there are the bilingual signs to underline the fact.

Trieste very nearly didn’t make it into the post-war world as Italian at all: Tito’s Yugoslavia prized it and its Italian identity was not reconfirmed until the mid-1950s, at which time it was decisively separated from its Istrian hinterland. Even then, the historian AJP Taylor proclaimed a great injustice and persisted in calling the place Trst, the southern Slav form of its name, which if nothing else saved on vowels.

The route into town from the airport sweeps along and above the coast, perilously close to a steep drop most of the way, the sea far below a brochure printer’s shade of blue. Discreet villas dot the hillsides. Here and there, an umbrella pine pops its head above the rest, as if to say Italy.

The airport bus dropped me on the waterfront, and I walked the rest of the way to my hotel. The street names were restlessly nationalistic, the city’s epic 20th century struggle to first become Italian and then stay that way etched into the landmarks.

The Molo Audace – a jetty in the centre of the waterfront that offered a rather pleasant late afternoon stroll – is named after the first Italian warship to dock in the city at the moment of its liberation from the Habsburgs. On its landward side there stands a small bronze statue of some forgotten patriot, rushing ashore to claim this Austrian Hamburg for the patria. The main square commemorates Italian Unity, though it was mostly designed by Austrian architects and wouldn’t disgrace the Ringstrasse in Vienna. The Piazza Oberdan commemorates a local patriot of Austrian extraction who tried to assassinate the emperor Franz Josef. In a city that owed its splendour – if not the mere fact of its existence – to the Habsburgs, this struck me as a little ungrateful. A few squared-off, travertine-clad modernist buildings in the heart of the city serve to remind visitors that as ruthless dictators go, Mussolini had better taste in matters architectural than most. Posters advertising the party conference of the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale were a reminder that the elegant Bar Rex is not Trieste’s only survivor from the era of the blackshirts.

My hotel, a small pension at the foot of the hill that leads to the cathedral, commemorated the lost Istrian territories in its name, but any suggestion of irredentism was softened by the ease with which the proprietors slipped from Italian into Slovene and back again as necessary.

After registering I returned to the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, the perfect spot for any visiting flaneur. It is quite splendid, a nineteenth century architectural statement of confidence on a scale to rival anything in Vienna, Liverpool or Glasgow. Most photographed of its buildings is the fussily ornate town hall, a restless confection in stone of caryatids, balustrades and other adornments; to one side the façade of the Palazzo del Governo glitters with gold. Better still, there is a smart pavement café, the Café degli Specchi. Trieste is the coffee-importing metropolis of Europe, so it seemed fitting to soak up the sunshine here over a latte macchiato.

But the wind – the notorious Bora, which plagues Trieste at certain times of the year – had other plans. Flecks of foaming milk took to the breeze like sea spume in a gale; one by one the bill, menu and napkin blew across the square. Abandoning the café, I wandered along the Riva Nazario Sauro, the city’s waterfront, then strolled through the streets of the Borgo Teresiano to the Canal Grande, where small boats moor right in the heart of the city. I had expected Trieste to be interesting, but not that it should be quite so handsome. The buildings are in a variety of styles – Central European baroque, neo-Venetian, proto-skyscraper, Byzantine, art nouveau – but they all share the same generous proportions and the same imperial or commercial swagger.

Only the old town, aloof on its hill, looked securely Italian: shuttered, ancient, and in places falling down. Halfway to the summit the Roman arch of Riccardo dominated a little piazza, and seemed far more solid than the neighbouring facades of part-demolished buildings, propped up by rusty scaffolding until work started on the new structures that would replace their vanished interiors. The castle and the adjacent cathedral crown the summit of the old town’s hill. The cathedral has an improvised look, for it was created out of two separate churches by some medieval improver.

But even from this hilltop the sea beckons. As a child I was fascinated by the era of the great ocean liners, which in the early 1970s had only recently sailed into the sunset. Trieste was once a mighty shipbuilding city and home port for the Lloyd Triestino and the Cosulich Line. The most glamorous Italian liners of them all were associated with Trieste. The luxurious pre-war Conte di Savoia had been built here; her sister, the even more legendary Rex, was sunk in the Bay of Muggia in 1944 as the Germans tried to block the harbour entrance with her. I hoped there might be some precious relics in the local maritime museum – a ship’s bell, perhaps, or a barnacle-encrusted cocktail shaker. I was to be disappointed, for the museum is rather dull. As I left I spotted a brochure for one of the Monfalcone shipyard’s latest creations, a vast slab of a cruise liner plying the Caribbean trade out of Miami. But the ocean voyage of my dreams was not to Cancun, but to Rio, with Paul Henreid and Bette Davis, art deco and bourbon old fashioneds. Henreid also played the Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo in Casablanca. Far from being Czech, however, he was born to Austrian parents in Trieste. A true Mitteleuropean.

Over the next few days the weather took a turn for the worse, and by the time I visited Miramare, the seaside castle built by the doomed Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, it was cold and raining constantly. Though its site on a headland with a perfect little harbour to one side is extremely romantic, Miramare struck me as a gloomy place. Architecturally it is a northern confection, a blend of Windsor Castle, Schinkel’s Schloss Babelsberg and the stations of the Great Western Railway. Inside, the contrast is between the private quarters of the Emperor and his wife Charlotte of Belgium, which are quietly charming, and the reception rooms, which are dour and pompous and point to a monstrous imperial inferiority complex. A painting showed Maximilian receiving the delegation that persuaded him – spare Habsburg that he was – to accept the Mexican crown. They shot him in 1867, and afterwards Charlotte went mad.

On my last morning in the city I chanced upon a dusty old bookshop. The sign outside promised Viele alte Deutsche Bücher – lots of old German books – and it wasn’t lying. Twenty minutes dredged up Heine and Goethe in the original German, an Italian-language guidebook to pre-1914 Berlin, and a copy of the Writer’s and Artists’ Yearbook 1970. I felt at last that I’d found the living, breathing, if rather dusty and old fashioned, cosmopolitan soul of Trieste.

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