Read Online Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris - Free Book Online
Authors: Jan Morris
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knowledge quiz, asking for instance who was represented in the marble sculpture in the atrium of the Revoltella Museum (the nymph Aurisina), and how many ice-cream parlours there were in the Viale XX Settembre (five).
By contemporary European standards this is still a calm and self-controlled city. It is one of the few big commercial centres of the continent that was not half-destroyed during the second world war, and in many ways its nineteenth-century moderation has survived. I happened to be sitting on a bench one day when a Chinese man had a heart attack on the seat next door. His wife was distraught, but the responses of passers-by were steady. One man gently laid the poor fellow out on the bench, and propped up his head with a rucksack. Another comforted the weeping wife. A third ran off to call the emergency services, and in a matter of moments, with a minimum of fuss, a woman doctor and two stalwart para-medics arrived to whisk the man away to hospital. “Who must I pay?” asked the wife helplessly. “Nobody, Madame,” she was proudly told, “it is a service of our city.”
Can it all last? Young people tell me they find the civic ethos oppressive. Others say it is being whittled away by the influx of migrants from Italy, who bring with them what one informant defined for me as caosmismo , chaoticness. Certainly the Trieste bourgeoisie seems to get older every year. Watch its representatives, any fine summer day, going down for their morning dalliances at the outdoor cafes beside the Canal Grande, with their sticks and spectacles and sunhats and little dogs on leads, and you may well think them a dying caste. I once came across a open-air concert in the Piazza della Borsa where a few hundred of them had assembled. From the waterfront there sounded, on the evening air, the thump of a rap band, but in the piazza all was fond sentimentality. The performer was a well-known Trieste artist called Umber to Lupi, who sang songs in the Trieste dialect. He was of a certain age himself, and he sat at his keyboard altogether relaxed, in shirt and slacks and anorak, while before him his elderly audience responded as they might to a family friend. They knew him well, and he knew them. As he sang they sang with him, laughed with him, swayed and tapped their feet as he did.
They were singing their own songs, in their own language, out of their own past. I noticed that some of their eyes were full of tears, and I almost wept a little myself: because of their age, because of mine, because of the hard times they had lived through, because Signor Lupi was a true professional, because of the sweet songs, because I feared that nobody would be singing them much longer, because of the decline of the bour-geosie across the world, and because—well, because of the Trieste effect.
TO CELEBRATE the start of the third millennium the whole of the Piazza Unità, the largest square in Italy, was officially painted over with an enormous picture to mark Trieste’s place in Europe. It showed a brave young woman, blond hair flying, riding a bull towards the open sea, with a sun and a moon above, and seven stars against an azure sky. Hundreds of citizens, young and old, had helped to spread its four tons of blue, yellow, red and white paint over the surface of the square, and they had been encouraged to add a thousand slogans and messages of their own, so that the whole was like the biggest graffito ever scrawled. Nobody could see all of it, except from a helicopter, and people wandered the piazza all day long, exploring the different corners of this communal signature.
The Irish-Triestine scholar John McCourt (to whose book The Years of Bloom I am much indebted) has likened the Trieste dialect to “a living encyclopedia of the cultures, nations and languages that had been assimilated by the city.” In the same way I thought the millennium painting in the Piazza Unità a proper index of the city’s character (and I considered it only
By contemporary European standards this is still a calm and self-controlled city. It is one of the few big commercial centres of the continent that was not half-destroyed during the second world war, and in many ways its nineteenth-century moderation has survived. I happened to be sitting on a bench one day when a Chinese man had a heart attack on the seat next door. His wife was distraught, but the responses of passers-by were steady. One man gently laid the poor fellow out on the bench, and propped up his head with a rucksack. Another comforted the weeping wife. A third ran off to call the emergency services, and in a matter of moments, with a minimum of fuss, a woman doctor and two stalwart para-medics arrived to whisk the man away to hospital. “Who must I pay?” asked the wife helplessly. “Nobody, Madame,” she was proudly told, “it is a service of our city.”
Can it all last? Young people tell me they find the civic ethos oppressive. Others say it is being whittled away by the influx of migrants from Italy, who bring with them what one informant defined for me as caosmismo , chaoticness. Certainly the Trieste bourgeoisie seems to get older every year. Watch its representatives, any fine summer day, going down for their morning dalliances at the outdoor cafes beside the Canal Grande, with their sticks and spectacles and sunhats and little dogs on leads, and you may well think them a dying caste. I once came across a open-air concert in the Piazza della Borsa where a few hundred of them had assembled. From the waterfront there sounded, on the evening air, the thump of a rap band, but in the piazza all was fond sentimentality. The performer was a well-known Trieste artist called Umber to Lupi, who sang songs in the Trieste dialect. He was of a certain age himself, and he sat at his keyboard altogether relaxed, in shirt and slacks and anorak, while before him his elderly audience responded as they might to a family friend. They knew him well, and he knew them. As he sang they sang with him, laughed with him, swayed and tapped their feet as he did.
They were singing their own songs, in their own language, out of their own past. I noticed that some of their eyes were full of tears, and I almost wept a little myself: because of their age, because of mine, because of the hard times they had lived through, because Signor Lupi was a true professional, because of the sweet songs, because I feared that nobody would be singing them much longer, because of the decline of the bour-geosie across the world, and because—well, because of the Trieste effect.
TO CELEBRATE the start of the third millennium the whole of the Piazza Unità, the largest square in Italy, was officially painted over with an enormous picture to mark Trieste’s place in Europe. It showed a brave young woman, blond hair flying, riding a bull towards the open sea, with a sun and a moon above, and seven stars against an azure sky. Hundreds of citizens, young and old, had helped to spread its four tons of blue, yellow, red and white paint over the surface of the square, and they had been encouraged to add a thousand slogans and messages of their own, so that the whole was like the biggest graffito ever scrawled. Nobody could see all of it, except from a helicopter, and people wandered the piazza all day long, exploring the different corners of this communal signature.
The Irish-Triestine scholar John McCourt (to whose book The Years of Bloom I am much indebted) has likened the Trieste dialect to “a living encyclopedia of the cultures, nations and languages that had been assimilated by the city.” In the same way I thought the millennium painting in the Piazza Unità a proper index of the city’s character (and I considered it only
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