Europe > Italy > Friuli-Venezia Giulia > Trieste > Articles > Trieste with James Joyce

They arrived at crowded Stazione Centrale in a cloud of steam but it might as well have been a cloud of scandal. He was only 22 and she 20; they were penniless and he did not even have a job to go. Worst of all, though, they did not have a ring. And she would soon be pregnant.

No matter; he could not live or breathe in Ireland, let alone write. But first things first: they had nowhere to stay that night and so Joyce, leaving Nora in a park in front of the station, with only their few shabby suitcases for company, set off in search of a room.

He made his way to Piazza Grande, Trieste's central square, a great rectangle lined on three sides by stately imperial buildings, its fourth, short side, as if lopped off, revealing the Adriatic sea. Here he found, not a hotel, but three deserting English sailors, who, drunken and rowdy, had attracted the attention of a local policeman.

Perhaps wanting to show off his squeaky new Italian, Joyce tried to intervene on their behalf but instead succeeded in getting himself arrested along with them. It was only with the aid of the British consul, one Harry Churchill, that he was freed some hours later and was able to return to an anxious Nora, where she waited in the park beneath the statue of "Sissi", the Empress Elisabetta, Franz Joseph's beautiful and recently assassinated wife.

We, several hundred of us, followed the unconventional couple through the Triestine streets all the while: to their next stop, Hotel Central, where they finally found a bed; to more lasting accommodation in a room overlooking Canal Grande and the fruit and vegetable market in long, elegant Piazza Ponterosso; and finally to the Berlitz Language School where, a whiff of employment being what had brought Joyce to Trieste, he had heard he might find a position.

But - what's this? Followed Joyce? He's been dead 50 years, hasn't he? True, he has, but a local troupe was doing a fine job recreating Scenes from an Arrival, his and Nora Barnacle's, that is, in Trieste a century before. It was to keep body more than soul together that Joyce had made for Trieste, but it was something about the soul of the city that would keep him there, off and, mainly, on, for another 16 years. And it was Joyce that had brought me to this port city on a little finger of northern Italy poking into the side of Slovenia, but it is something about Trieste itself that would bring me back.

Ulysses, Joyce's masterwork, ostensibly describes Dublin but, according to Renzo Crivelli, one of several resident Joyce experts in the city, it is at least as much about Trieste, where Joyce began to write it. Or rather, the professor explained to me over coffee – just before the invisible curtain-rise on that ambitious piece of street theatre, whose script he had written – Ulysses maps a Dublin upon which Trieste has been superimposed.

At the turn of the 20th century Trieste was still the great trading conduit of the Habsburg empire. To the Latin and Germanic mix that had been bubbling away ever since the city came under Austrian dominion, in the 14th century, along with a strong Slavic flavour imparted by proximity, had been added a melange of cultural and linguistic influences shipped in from all over the world. The heterogeneous, polyglot nature of the city at this time probably finds no better mirror than in the rambunctious, babel novels Ulysses and, the later work, Finnegans [NO APOSTROPHE] Wake. Indeed, Joyce said at one point he could write only in "la bella nostra Trieste", as he affectionately dubbed his home from home.

With the first world war and the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Trieste lost its status as Mitteleuropa's port of ports. It returned briefly to Italy only to be ruled in turn by the Third Reich, Tito's Yugoslav army and then, for nine years, the allies before being finally handed back to Rome again, in 1954. Trieste may have been battered by its 20th century vicissitudes, but this constant swapping of passports has only deepened the mystery of its identity that is part of its great, enduring allure.

This protean quality extends to its citizens. I was shocked when, being shown around by my guide, Hélène, that cars would stop for us at zebra crossings - something barely heard of in Europe as a whole and surely only a fantasy in Italy. Oh, she said, that was quite Triestine: it was the relaxed Austrian influence, manifested, too, in the way the city's inhabitants linger reading newspapers in the numerous cafes rather than bolting down an espresso as they do in Rome or nearby Venice.

Always concerned with trade – Tergeste, the ancient name for the city, means "market town – Triestines are thoroughly outward looking. They are voracious consumers of culture: the city is thick with bookshops (the antiquarian ones are particularly good; try the Umberto Saba, beneath one of Joyce's old residences, for a good selection of antique prints) and a recent survey found its inhabitants buy a wildly disproportionate number of cinema and theatre tickets. On the programme for November and December at the preeminent Teatro Verdi, one of Joyce's old haunts, were Hair, the musical, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Hélène said she had a theory that Trieste itself was like a theatre, a series of oppositions between stage and backstage: the grand, clean-swept squares masking higgledy-piggledy backstreets, the gleaming salons of the cafés fronting grubby kitchens. These facades, that questionable nationality and a sense of having slipped from view make up a seductive secrecy, which begins to whisper at you as you walk the streets of the city.

The long sweep of the waterfront is perhaps the best place to start, making for the former Piazza Grande, now Piazza Unità d'Italia. Behind the square - with your back to the sea - the former Jewish ghetto is tucked away, now peppered with hole-in-the-wall shops selling bric-a-brac and antiques. The whole quarter to the left of here, the Borgo Teresiano, was a great 19th-century experiment in town planning, and its rigidly right-angled streets are refeshingly easy to navigate.

This is where the best fashion pickings are to be found; the most prestigious shops are clustered, fittingly, around Corso Italia, sartorial preoccupation being one of the city's Italian traits. The area is rich with bars and cafés, too; the Illy coffee company is based in Trieste, and you will be assured of an exquisitely balanced "nero" - Triestine dialect for "espresso" - at one of its "concept cafes" (Illy tins scattered coral-like on sand in recessed displays) on Via San Nicolò and Via Roma. Caffé San Marco, with cappuccinoesque soft white lighting floating over dark-wood banquettes, is a more venerable institution, its expansive interior sprinkled with a good selection of Triestines, from students to lunching old ladies and the odd scribbling local author.

Poor Joyce: for that's what he was, almost constantly impecunious, but partly because in Trieste he and Nora would eat out every night. You could, too, if your wallet could tolerate it, without stumbling back into the same establishment for several months. But you might be in for a few disappointments: my four seafood courses at Harry's Grill - founded by the same eponymous Arrigo who made his name in Venice - were barely surpassable, but the trattoria cooking in the city was mediocre and the service snappy (I don't mean fast).

For an inexpensive taste of Triestine cuisine, head instead straight for one of the buffets around town: not smorgasbords, as we understand "buffet", but pork specialists. Tables become a hot currency at lunchtime at the long-established Buffet Da Pepi, for example where you might, typically, wash down a plate of hot baked ham, sausage, belly and tongue with lager or a sharp red Terrano. Buffets promise an unforgettably meaty experience, enhanced by the culinary version of that sense of dislocation.

Trieste does have its monuments. It is worth climbing up the Colle di San Giusto to the castello and cattedrale for the fine view of the city alone. Down at the seafront, you can enter the consummate Greek Orthodox church of San Nicolò for a glimpse of a very different kind of Christian worship: more gilt, less guilt. The atheistic Joyce attended services here just for the spectacle. The region offers a pick of day trips, too, such as the pretty fishing village of Muggia, where the restaurants on the pier are even closer to the catch than in Trieste. At Aquileia, a third century Christian mosaic the size of a tennis court is vivid testimony to the struggles of the then imperilled creed.

But it is something other than sights that draws you to "la bella nostra Trieste", as Joyce called his and Nora's city of exile.

Articles

• More from Simon Busch