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Bella
città, Trieste
Trieste
really is a splendidly situated city, fully justifying a few of the
claims in the tourist brochures put out by the city's Ente di
Turismo and the other agencies sponsored by the city government and
its wealthy mayor the coffee importer Riccardo Illy. Close to the
head of the gulf named after it, it spreads languidly along the
coast and up the fingers of valleys splayed out like a human hand
spreading down from the pine-clad forested hills ringing the city.
And if it has no beaches worthy of the name, at least that can come
as no objection given the over-polluted times we live in.
Trieste is certainly handsome, at least that part of its centre that stares out over the sea. Its Austro-Hungarian centre built in the nineteenth century and has florid neo-Classical facades that gaze out from the centre of the port area. Looking like temples in a mythical landscape or a painting by Claude Lorraine, they are often carved from the white limestone in the surrounding pine-tree hills. Trieste may have a handsome city centre but it also has a heart of stone, which is well matched by its triumphalist architecture: the overdimensioned Victory Lighthouse above Roiano, two miles south of the city; the faceless white marble wastes put up during Fascist times; the grim black buildings of the city's functional business quarter; the uninspired surrounding residential areas, and the uncouth industrial suburbs dating from Austrian times. Indeed, the few Art Nouveau buildings dating from the turn of the century are pale imitations of their Viennese Sezession models. Trieste at the millennium has many run-down undressed red-brick factories of the type that made industrial towns in the Austrian Empire physically resemble the Prison-House of the Nations and foreshadowed Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Finally, Trieste's Roman Theatre dates mostly from the nineteen-thirties, or at least was heavily restored at that time to flesh out Trieste's claim to being Italian. Not to mention the gigantism of our own day and age: the popular housing block like a giant citadel at the head of the Longera valley, the towers of the city hospital at Cattinara, and the stunningly awful ecclesiastical monstrosity called the Santuario di Monte Grisa, overhanging the ridge north of the city that all but defecates on the landscape. Not to mention the abandoned barracks and encampments surrounding the city that still remain unconverted to civilian use, waiting since 1945 for a war with Yugoslavia that never came and from which it was insulated by its neighbours, the South Slav states of Slovenia and Croatia. Trieste's wealth is no more, apart from Mayor Illy and the Assicurazioni Generali, and the often nearly bankrupt Grandi Motori constantly being baled out by the Italian government. Its economy is supported against all the tenets of the European Union, by the Italian government by all manner of subsidies that would probably be illegal if they were not fudged under regional aid headings: subsidies for petrol, tax holidays for incoming firms, inducements to build in certain areas, etc. etc. Aaah, but its cafés: the Specchi with the gracious mirrors that give its name, the San Marco with its Art deco interior, the Tomaseo, and so on. Aah but.... But I defy anyone who is not invited and has an income of less than 100,000 dollars a year or has been invited to feel truly at home in the former, the famous San Marco is forever changing managements and closes down every now and then as current sponsors refuse to bail it out any longer. We are multicultural, say the Triestinos. Looking out towards East and West, our openness is bringing in the wealth of the hinterland that was once joined to it in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that saw the zenith of its power and Trieste's prosperity in the years before the First World War. After all, people will tell you, many of us speak German, and we have strong links with our hinterland. We have a university with strong academic links to Central Europe, a renowned school of interpreters, etc. Well that's as may be, and the writer Claudio Magris , who first made his name when teaching at the faculty of Germanic studies, certainly is multicultural. But I would consider him an exception, the one that proves the rule maybe, and in any case he does not originate from Trieste but from further inland in Friuli. Trieste certainly turns its linguistic and political back on its nearest neighbours, the Croats and Slovenes, "Sciavi" as they are called in common Triestino racist parlance, a deliberately racist dialectal pun on the word for Slav or slave. Trieste city has a documented history of hostility to all things Slav that reaches back to the nineteenth century when Slovene schools were torn down, as happened in the suburb of Roiano when the plot of land on part of which one such school was being erected spread within the Trieste city limits. The Italian dominated Trieste Council under Austrian rule ordered it to be torn down, saying that the Slavs were not be encouraged within the city of Trieste. |
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