Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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Morris links Trieste to Manchester through its hard-headedness, its immigrant communities and its culture, in the form of universities, museums, concert orchestras and radical newspapers. A few years later, the ringing words of Churchill’s Fulton speech floated down across the decades in grainy black-and-white on BBC: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

The hotel where the scholar Winckelmann died, the cafes Stella Polare and San Marco where the intelligentsia hung out. First of all, I don't often read travel writing of this type, but as I love the city of Trieste and am prepping to take a group of students there next week and a former roommate left a copy of this laying around my apartment. On nationality, Morris refers to herself as “a racial half-breed (father Welsh, mother English)” and talks about the Welsh resentment of the English, the Saeson, who first invaded the Principality in the 11th century under the Norman monarchy, and conquered it in the 13th century under Edward I. It was usually good narrative that used to give me that feeling - until I read this book, the only descriptive travel book that managed to catch my heart and not my brain only.Time did not permit me to see the castle of Miramare, but how to resist Maximilian’s pride and joy, now seeped in the sadness of eternity, because it was the same Maximilian whose life came to such a sticky end in Mexico 150 years ago, sacrificed to lurid fantasies of empire and providing fodder for literature and film and Mexican legend ever since, featured in the middle parts of Bolano’s "The Savage Detectives" and inspiring a vast, celebrated novel by Fernando del Paso? I'm still wondering about the peculiar concept of nowhereness, that makes the title of the book, and that the author attributes to Trieste. When Churchill got specific in his "Iron Curtain" speech, he said that line dividing democracy and Communism stretched from Stettin to Trieste.

Jan Morris has no rival as a decoder of all that is idiosyncratic and defnitive in the peculiar identity of places throughout the world. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time.A wistful book written beautifully, read easily, by a man-woman now drowning in time, looking for kindness, finding a place that she describes is the closest to humanist, or perhaps as farthest from petty ideas of race, religion, gender as you might get. Un oras care a apartinut atator natiuni, populat de natiunea expatilor din toata lumea care s-au simtit aici acasa, macinat de iredentism, care l-a adus in sanul Italiei, unde si-a pierdut, printre alte porturi mai mari, sensul sau de a fi - port liber, iesirea la mare a unui mare imperiu. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. And always above me, the Habsburg streetlamps, that lovely, unique creation, a perfect golden sphere of glass trapped in a fine wire mesh, which for me is the enduring symbol of Trieste and its Habsburgs, and the image that spurs me on to my next book, Simon Winder’s Danubia.