Published in 2001, this is by Jan Morris (1926-2020), with whose work, it has to be said, I'm not hugely familiar.

Back in 1992, though, at a point when I was pretty disillusioned with travel writing as a genre, I borrowed from my local library an anthology of journeyings (my diary doesn't record the title). One of the contributors who made me revise my jaundiced opinion of the travelogue, convincing me that it wasn't all gaudy or pretentious or out for a cheap laugh, was Jan Morris. Her account of her entry into Spain really resonated. She didn't take the Col de Somport, as we had done in 1988 in our brave little Panda, but rather crossed via a different pass. Nevertheless, the feeling she expressed -- of entering a totally different place that didn't follow the rules of the Europe we'd known up to then -- was identical to ours.

She popped up on my radar again at the end of 2020, shortly before she died. The essay on Venice, which I stumbled upon at that point, I found very impressive.

This one was on my list because in just a few weeks' time, we should be finding ourselves for the first time in Trieste...

I loved it. I find the way she writes captivating. The tone is always kind (Morris prizes kindness -- it's "what matters, all along, at any age"). She's amusing. She's erudite. You feel she would be a good travel companion.

It's hard to categorize, though. It's not purely a travel guide (although I was constantly busy with a notepad jotting down ideas for our upcoming visit); and it's not purely a history (although you definitely learn lots about Trieste's colourful past). It's more a reflection on what Trieste means to Morris, and why. (She was 75 when she wrote it, and she claimed it would be her last book, but she continued to publish until the year she died, at the age of 94. Way To Go...)

Her feelings for Trieste are complex. "Ever since I arrived there as a young soldier at the end of the second world war," she explains, "this city has curiously haunted me." The feeling is best summed up by the Welsh word hiraeth, which conveys the idea of unspecified yearning. "In sum," she continues, "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. The Trieste effect, I call it. It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere." She is not the only one, she contends. Almost everything she has read about Trieste, by writers down through the centuries, evokes melancholy: "Trieste makes one ask sad questions of oneself. What am I here for? Where am I going? It had this effect upon me when I was in my teens; now that I am in my seventies, in my jejune way I feel it still... This is a place of transience, where power and prosperity come and go."


The Isle of Man... This is the place that arouses my hiraeth... The closest Manx equivalent to this word is "foddeeaght"

Morris argues that Trieste is a city made for exiles. And, certainly, many famous visitors have passed this way: Casanova, Egon Schiele (he painted Man Screaming after his return to Vienna), Johann Winckelmann (German art historian, murdered a week after arriving), Sigmund Freud, and so many more...


Statue of Sissi (aka Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary) in Geneva (where she was assassinated in 1898). She often stayed at Miramare Castle in Trieste

But why should melancholy and nostalgia be the primary feeling that so many associate with this city? Perhaps it's the climate, which many find trying (there's this wind, apparently...) Perhaps it's the geographical situation ("it always seems to be on a fold in the map, hemmed-in, hole-in-corner"). But more likely it's what Morris calls its loss of purpose. Once the principal port of a great continental empire (the one run by the Habsburgs in various guises), it succumbed to peripheral status as the world changed around it. She admits the 21st century has ushered in a new city spirit, and brought advances in tourism, science, and more. But she can't shake off her original impressions, even while watching the Barcolana, a vibrant and important yachting festival: "It was a grand foretaste, I thought, of vitalities to come -- or an echo of vigours past. Yet even as I watched, the Trieste effect intervened, like a migraine that clouds the vision, and in my dreaming eye I saw the whole bay empty and brooding again, and the castle all alone out there..."

Sombre, then, our Trieste. But it has its charm, she argues, and it's seldom dull.


Yogyakarta. Another hiraeth place for me

Trieste's history is crazy ("you NEED a historical atlas here"). The original inhabitants were Illyrians, an Indo-European people. It was colonized by the Romans under the name Tergeste; it was harassed by Venice, which raided and sporadically occupied it; and at the end of the 14th century, it was entrusted by its local rulers to the protection of the Habsburg monarchy in Vienna. It became their main maritime outlet to the world, and by the turn of the 20th century was a Very Important Port. After World War I, it was handed over to Italy, but the end of World War II saw a very unsettled period: "For a time the place was divided between rival occupying armies -- Britons and Americans in one part, Yugoslavs in another -- and for a year or two it became an independent Free Territory under the auspices of the United Nations." Then, in 1954, it was handed back to Italy, but that teardrop-shaped peninsula that buffers it to the south became part of Yugoslavia. As a result, as Morris explains, "There are people in this city whose grandparents were born Austrian, whose parents came into the world as Italians, who were themselves born as citizens of a Free Territory and whose children are Italian again. A few miles away, just across the border, aged citizens have been governed in their own lifetimes by Austrians, Italians, Germans, Britons, Yugoslavs and Slovenians."

Trieste had always been a cosmopolitan locality. With its contingents of Austrians, Italians, Slovenes, and Croats, "it was closer to the European Community of the twenty-first century than to the British Empire of the nineteenth... For generations this place was a melting-pot of races and types. Every travelling writer mentions its vivacity." Although "the false passion of the nation-state" meant that Trieste was not immune from racism and chauvinism, Morris feels that it is still the natural capital of that cosmopolitan diaspora who "form a mighty nation, if they only knew it". It is a place that makes her recognize for what it is "the fateful nonsense of nationalism, for which so many of my generation, and my father's too, had fought and died".

As well as a treasure trove of history, this book is also a cornucopia of literature. I'd already realized that Trieste has a disproportionate number of literary connections, but really, there are SO many... This book has generated a reading list as long as both arms.

I won't mention all these authors here. No doubt they'll pop up in The Velvet Cushion in the coming weeks, months, and years.


I'll mention Mann, though: "Didn't Mann write part of Buddenbrooks, the ultimate novel of the bourgeoisie, during his stay at the Hotel de la Ville?" Lacking photos of Luebeck to illustrate that post, I pressed Bergen, with its Hanseatic links, into service...

Of course, I don't see eye to eye with Morris on everything. Born three decades or so before me, her attitude to empire is more akin to my mother's than to mine: "Ours seemed to me a good empire then, and on the whole I think so still. Over the years I have learnt to look back at it only occasionally with shame (the fundamental principle of empire having soured on all of us) but more often with a mixture of pride, affection, and pathos." I would never be able to see the British Empire in that way.

And it remains to be seen whether her elegiac commentary on Trieste will match our experience. My mind is open.

But her thoughts on aging are spot on... "Much of this little book, then," she admits, "has been self-description. I write of exiles in Trieste, but I have generally felt myself an exile too... The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind... This kind of exile can mean a new freedom, too, because most things don't matter as they used to... My Trieste has been a place of transience, but dear God we are all transients, and sooner or later we all become out-of-date."

I can't do better than conclude with another quote: "Birth and death are the ultimate bookends, and between them a muddied narrative unfolds."

Remember, though, that she lived the best part of another two decades after this book was published. We might get a bit dilapidated, but we can still bear witness.