September 24 (Day Twelve)
An interesting thing at Hotel Milano: the halls are dark but, as you walk down them, lights turn on automatically. Thus, going downstairs at night to write in my journal (so as not to disturb Lindy), I set off whole sections of corridor ahead of me as I advance.
Last night closed with an enigmatic event. I used the Milano computer to check my email on the server and found a message from Hotel James Joyce, confirming a reservation for the following night in Trieste. This confirmation came quite a bit after the fact: three days of writing them and three phone calls were all unsuccessful, so we gave up. Hence, we arrived in Trieste without any reservation. Now their email implies that this is their first response to us, suggesting that Lindy’s phone calls that each time elicited only a word she interpreted as pieno must have ended her up somewhere else. Perhaps she transposed a digit; perhaps Elena’s email had an error. In any case the James Joyce sounds interesting from its name alone and, even if moving would be quite inconvenient now, going to see it provides a possible goal on a morning exploration of town.
The day has a ruder surprise. Going online again at the hotel computer after breakfast, I find an urgent email from Auto Europe, informing us that we cannot take our present car into Eastern Europe. There has obviously been a misunderstanding in the transfer of reservations, they say, and someone overnight in Portland has just recognized it and is freaking out. A bold sentence telling us not to drive the car into Eastern Europe is repeated, like a court summons, between each paragraph. At the end, they give me their toll-free number and insist that I call at once.
I go to the lobby phone booth and, after some experimentation, get their number and speak to a woman on the night shift back in the States. It takes six separate phone calls to complete our conversation, as we are cut off each time by something that sounds like another call dialing through but whose dialing never stops until it washes out the voice.
The relevant issue is that Auto Europe is the car guarantor, and only some autos are insured for travel in Eastern Europe. We have to be driving one of those, which means Avis not Hertz because Hertz has no cars in Trieste designated for Eastern European use.
When we finally complete the exchange, the upshot is that they will try to reinstate our Avis reservation. After all we are in Trieste where we were going to be anyway on the 25th. The only difference is that we drove here rather than taking the train, but that affects the Elf not any new car. There is some concern about getting a new car on short notice, as the prior reservation cannot simply be recalled.
As for the Elf the woman says it will be no problem to return it to Hertz in Trieste rather than Pisa, as originally required, or Venezia in ten days, as the present reservation, assuming a Slovenian run, states.
After the cloud of the impending disaster—being stranded here without a vehicle—has lifted, I leave the phone booth relieved and walk into a different buzzsaw.
The morning desk clerk at the Milano, a previously unnotable young man who at worst seemed slightly officious when setting me up on the computer, is now behaving like an arresting officer. When he left me on the computer, he told me it was 3 euros per fifteen minutes, a standard fee that, if it had been mentioned by the female clerk the previous night, was lost in translation. can live with that charge, though it is a little disappointing, as I thought the Internet was a perk for guests. The clerk did look at his watch, indicating that it would be a “hard” fifteen minutes—a kind of punctilious policing I found menial. It was not anything, however, that I dwelled on.
Now, as I blithely leave the phone booth, assuming my business is done, he hails me from behind the desk and announces very loudly and accusingly that I have been calling America and owe the hotel money. It is as if I am being arrested on the spot. He actually orders me to stop right there as though I have been trying to get away with something and it is time to summon the polizia.
I immediately explain that I have been dialing a toll-free number, but he is having none of that. Lapsing between Italian and English, he works himself into seeming apoplexy. I can’t really understand what he is saying—that is, with any precision—except his pure repetition gets across to me the concept that the hotel will be charged for my calls; thus I must reimburse them. He is checking some sort of video screen behind the desk, which apparently logs all calls and made and instantaneously registers their costs. Twelve euros in this case, or $16.
I am not really that upset; I presume that I can recover the cost from Auto Europe, and anyway, such are the hazards of traveling. Yet his rude manner elicits aggression back from me. I complain about being cut off five times—as a good part of the cost is the separate rate for initiating individual calls—but he jumps at the opportunity to blame that on the American, not the Italian, phone system and concludes with a peremptory flick of the hand, as if to affirm it is my business not his.
My explanation about the toll-free number simply agitates him because it feels, no doubt rightly, as though I am trying to impose yet another idiotic, juvenile American reality on Italy, which has its own rigorous and derelict bureaucracy but one that is familiar and covertly admired and certainly defended in any squabbles with foreigners. I am being the “ugly American,” but I don’t care because I dislike this young guy and his supercilious tone.
In the midst of this brouhaha, he scans the other side of the room and triumphantly declares that because the computer is still on, I owe for an entire hour, not just the five minutes I was online. In truth, I went up to the desk and briefly interrupted his exchange with another patron to tell him I was leaving the computer at the time I entered the phone booth. There is even a specific moment I can cite to jog his memory: I borrowed a piece of paper and a pen from him for my conversation with Auto Europe.
He either doesn’t understand what I am saying or, more likely, is indulging a combined militaristic and sadistic streak, so he repeats that he is going to put an 12 additional euros onto my room, as though daring me to do anything about it. Even as I try to say a word, he shouts over me in mixed English and Italian, pointing across the lobby again to the computer. “You are still using it!” he insists. “It’s still on.” I know this is provocation—intentional and blatant harassment. He is doing it to bully and provoke, so I am going to fight back vigorously. I repeat several times that he knows very well I was off the computer, gaining steam with each one. He takes my outraged resistance as insolence, throwing up his arms dramatically, turning to his left, and shouting for reinforcements.
Two large men come out of a room adjoining the space behind the front desk. A real fat one in his mid-sixties, very red-faced and speaks no English and is mainly yelling at everyone, including the clerk, in a spate of apparent assertions that are of course unintelligible to me. He is like an electric organ that someone has turned on. A second, more pleasant-looking man in his late thirties follows; he enunciates in strained but adequate English. He gets the issue across to me diplomatically: it is not the hotel’s fault; the free number is probably fine, but the Italian phone system is incompetent. Kind of heavy-set with a very wide face, wire glasses, and a conservative but spikey hairdo, he is actually quite sweet and patient, the sort of politician who kisses babies and magister who spoils children—a born mediator.
The situation has also drawn a woman with an Australian accent and very fluent Italian. Perhaps (I suspect) to show off her Italian, she now starts arguing with all three men about my “free” number and it being unfair that I am charged for their problem. At this point I consider this issue pretty much resolved, but she is really getting into it with the sweet guy, which re-arouses the rotund one just as he is leaving. He sets his imposing bulk back behind the desk and shouts uncontrollably to no one in particular, like an opera singer belting out an aria. Apparently her Italian has had a bite. Everyone seems to be trying to calm him down, e.g. the two other hoteliers behind the desk—but this Pavarotti guy is really going at it obliviously. As the Australian woman fires back in Italian, he seems ready to explode. I am a mere bystander now, making no further protest, while she seems delighted with her Italian oratory, flying back and forth between English (for my benefit) and Italian like a bird.
Afterward she explains to me that she merely asked the large one to put a sign on the phone, advising people that American European toll-free numbers would cost money here—but big man takes this as a slur: he will not have any sign on the booth implying a failing of the hotel. The failing, he insists, is either of the Italian or American phone systems and has nothing to do with the Milano or its responsibility to its patrons. This is the point he has gotten himself so lathered up to make. Sometimes, he has been saying, calls are free; sometimes they are not. The phone system is imperfect, and this is a fact of life. The hotel only charges what it is charged. No sign is necessary. Absolutely no sign. Ever. Not in the Milano.
That is the gist of it.
When she finishes her account, she oddly presses my hand to her bosom and suggests a drink, but I tell her that my wife and I are headed out for a walk. Not missing a step, she coos, “Have a good holiday,” and departs.
Now the asshole clerk is attacking me again on the matter of the computer. A newly-arriving spikey-hairdo man takes a moment to grasp the dilemma but, when he does, he indicates very cordially that there will be no charge at all for the computer, only the phone. The clerk looks visibly crestfallen; then he regains steam and, after arguing heatedly with his superior in Italian while counting with his fingers and pointing at me, he starts to defy his instruction and keyboard a charge anyway. The other man halts and reprimands him, then turns to me and says with an affable smile that I will only be charged for the previous evening’s use, nothing at all today.
The clerk stands to the side, glaring, nursing his wounds from this slight. He is a hanging judge who wants to throw the book at me, just on principle and from general envy and colicky constitution, perhaps also in reprisal at Americans—he is from the same school as the conductor on the train out of Bologna. As a new guest arriving requires his attention, the event is effectively discontinued. The manager and I introduce ourselves to each other. He is Stefano, and now he wants to try to understand my auto issue (that caused this whole confrontation) and also to help me with it.
His English is not good enough to make this simple. It is amazing how many different subtle concepts are involved in communicating the single state of affairs in play—so many nuances involving insurance of cars in Eastern Europe, our method of travel from Siena to Trieste, my use of an intermediary in the U.S., the timing and logistics involving the return of one car and the getting of another, and the relationships among all of these. After many passes with course corrections to handle just about every imaginable misunderstanding, I succeed. Then we go through a perusal of the phone book together, trying to see where the Hertz and Avis offices, respectively, are. For a while it appears that there are only rental-car offices at the airport, 45 kilometers away in the opposite direction of Slovenia. That would be a major hassle. But it could be even worse: what if only one of the rental agencies is at the Trieste airport? Then we will have to return one car and get to the other somehow by public transportation, unless we rent the new one first and drive in tandem for an hour to the second. The exchange will consume the better part of a day.
A long time is spent going back and forth, trying to choreograph how my wife and I will solve this riddle, much of it an English lesson for Stefano. Then a breakthrough! As he is looking through the phone book maybe for the fifth time, he sees that there is a pier right in town on the Gulf of Trieste where cars are also rented. Immediately he tries to confirm this solution (to verify Hertz and Avis are on the same pier) by cross-examination of addresses and then clinching phone calls to both companies.
I am not sure what to hope for or how to interpret this new tack. After all, the woman at Auto Europe did mention the airport too as the locale for the cars; yet I have just as little wish to travel out there as to flaunt the rules and risk consequences. I also have no desire to call her back for clarification, though I would gladly spend the money again if I could convince her to transfer the rental to the pier…as long as both Hertz and Avis are there, which Stefano is checking. (In fact, he will eventually call Auto Europe himself, from behind the desk on the Milano’s dime, and ask them to email reservations so he can print them out and we can view them together. When he gets them on the phone, they do not have the new reservation ready yet—it will take another two hours. But they have already generated a replacement form for returning the Elf. They email that at once. It happily turns out to say: Molo Bersaglieri, Centro Congressi—the pier in Trieste).
Somewhere in this conversation while we are waiting between busy signals on one of the calls, I tell Stefano the story about the James Joyce which, though complex in itself for our limited language compatibility, gets across to him on my first try, maybe because he is used to hotel reservation imbroglios. Despite the fact that it involves a rival establishment, he looks it up for in the phone book and draws me a route on the map to get there. During the next gap in phone calls he marks another route, to a site where we can sign up (if we want) for a walking tour later that afternoon. This is quite prescient on his part, for it is the very tour that we have had our eye on since the previous evening, as it is advertised on the lobby wall.
During this latter conversation Lindy finally joins us from her breakfast and needs to be brought up to speed on everything that has transpired, beginning all the way back at my email from Auto Europe. Hearing about the tour, our most recent topic, she starts asking Stefano for directions into town so that we can go make reservations. It is difficult to explain to her, in a way that he will understand too, what is happening right at that moment, for instance, that I already have two very adequate routes and our friend is quite busy on other matters. Feeling expendable, she heads upstairs in the elevator to retrieve her own map on which she has marked some things she wants to see too, like museums and historical sites, with the hope that he will mark out those routes too. While this is going on, Stefano makes a call to the walking tour and tentatively reserves places for us and confirms the hour. All we have to do is go down and pay. I am surprised that he picked up those nuances between Lindy and me, and I thank him for his graciousness.
While she is upstairs, the conversation between us now takes yet another turn. He tells me that he has to leave soon because he is going to an art exhibit in Croatia for the afternoon, but he will be back tomorrow in time for work. He wonders if I would like to have a drink with him now before he leaves. I ask him if he could postpone it till the morning, presuming he is back in time and we are still at the Milano by then—both of which we agree, with gathering enthusiasm for each other’s company, are likely. I mean, why should I want to leave this hotel now that I have made a friend? Somewhere in the conversation I take out my wallet and hand him my card. He sees my name, Grossinger, and hastens to his office to fetch his card: Stefano Stern. Then he holds up two fingers together, touches his heart and laughs with a warmth that almost brings tears to his eyes, as though he is weeping for joy. “We are like brothers,” he declares, as he shakes my hand. I am not sure if he means German or Jewish, but I am not going to probe this outburst of affection, as I don’t want to talk him out of the least bit of enthusiasm for our new friendship. We are human and have rapport, and that should be enough. I am not particularly Jewish except ethnically and I am certainly not German, but who cares? In any case, he has moved on to another discovery—that I am a publisher, pointing to that designation on my card.
I circle the website on my card and tell him to look up my books. He says that they will be his English lesson and that once upon a time he wanted to be a publisher himself, or perhaps to go to work for an Italian publisher, but—and here he gives a deep sigh and pantomimes “alas”—he must make money for familia.
“Bambinos?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “Papa.”
Lindy has returned and is surprised by the deepened tenor of our exchange. She stands there for a while, as we talk about literature and our upcoming travels respectively in Slovenia and Croatia, and she gets a bit impatient with these two guys waxing melodramatic for reasons she doesn’t understand. Finally we all have to move on, Stefano (looking at his watch) to slip out of work and get to Croatia, and us to saunter downtown. He asks me to promise, if we don’t see each other again, that I will email him and start an exchange about literature when we get back to the States. I promise but also proclaim that we will of course meet on the morrow.
Only when Lindy and I are out on the street and headed to the corner of Ghega and Roma can I communicate the detailed subtext. She is as delighted as I am but also quite curious to know if Stefano is Jewish or not. I prefer leaving it ambiguous and dismiss her idea of asking him.
The event has actually delighted me to the point of being slaphappy, unable to stop giggling; in fact, I can barely talk I am laughing so much. I surprise even myself. I realize I am so moved that I am just about crying too. This is a little over the top for Lindy, as she is more concerned about the car crisis and whether it will get resolved in time for us leave for Slovenia the next day. I am in my bubble, enjoying the goofy energy while indulging in an entire juicy mental review of the entire lobby theater while appreciating scenic Italy.
Walking down Via Roma, we stop often to look at amazing architecture. So many of the buildings have decorative stonework in them to a degree that summons closer examination. Scrutiny reveals enough artistry that a whole photography book could probably be created from the details on each and every building, even though most of them are mere apartments and offices. They are palaces, composed of giant frescoes and sculptures, all the more so when they are official edifices or take the most ornate route: the Trieste museum and the opera house. When I say “decorative stonework,” I mean whole three-dimensional statues built into indentations in the buildings, depicting Roman, Christian, and Renaissance figures. These statues across the fronts of walls are larger-than-life and fully inset so that their outer edges are no more than flush with the façade itself. Not only are there statues but fleur d’lis designs, friezes, gargoyles, and all sorts of other devices that no doubt have formal names in art-theory books. Here is Mercury; here is Pan; here is the crucifixion; here is a Roman senator; and so on.
We reach the central plaza, Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia, from where the wide-open vista of the Gulf of Trieste is dramatically visible, hundreds of boats separated on the great expanse, hordes of people walking beside this Adriatic inlet, many sitting on the wall right over the water.
After a number of false trails using the map, spiced by a few queries of women with baby carriages (after all, they are probably local), we find the Information Center at Piazza Squero, arriving by a back route through a dark, urine-stenched alley after passing right in front of it unknowingly ten minutes earlier. There, after waiting on line behind yet an obnoxious American couple in Italy determined to get at least fifteen minutes of advice—fuck the line of tourists behind them—we register for the walking tour at 16:30. Then we continue on our jaunt to try to find the obscure narrow little street, Via del Cavazzeni, which houses the James Joyce.
This is a worthy adventure, taking us perhaps only a few blocks from the Information Center but to the edge of a much older, more eroded part of town, one that resembles Siena and Lucca. We know we are on the right trail because we pass a number of plaques commemorating “James Joyce in Trieste. ” Later we learn that he spent ten years in this port at the turn of the century, teaching English. Always short on cash and behind on his debts, he moved from dwelling to dwelling, one favorite dining spot to another, leaving behind a host of unpaid obligations. All in all, he lived at more than twenty sites, providing many plaque opportunities.
When looking for a one-block street in a maze of winding viae in a foreign city, you rely on the inevitable logic of the map. It is the sole thread through the tangle. But the map, as Gregory Bateson pointed out long ago, is not the territory, and there are always—as we found out in Siena— surprises, whether of orientation, scale, or interpretation. In this case we track ourselves along a slightly wrong path, thus are lucky to pick up a different end of an adjacent street to the one we were looking for and from there turn unexpectedly right into Cavezzini, as marked by a charming board-sign for the James Joyce. It is a tiny alley off another tiny alley, curling sharply downhill alongside some major construction and restoration. The hotel’s brief residential door-front is tucked away in an urban gorge, dark as twilight because of the towering height and proximity of pinkish-brown walls on either side of the passageway. Opposite walls of this alley inflatedly called Via del Cavazzeni lean so close to each other just past the James Joyce that they seem about to touch. A person could not even lie head-to-toe across the street without bending.
It may be somewhat unclear why we have taken this journey in the first place. The last thing we want to do is move ourselves, our luggage, and our vehicle. Perhaps it is that the name “James Joyce” is magic. Initially the challenge was just to see where it was—we wanted to go on a quest; we wanted an excuse to explore Trieste’s interstices.
The secret reason for our visit becomes clear upon arriving, when identifying ourselves as the people who have reservations and got the email. A studious and obviously intelligent bespectacled young clerk in a blue and white pinstriped shirt is excited to greet the writers of the many messages. He is a friend of the owner, on duty only during weekends, and the more astute custodian of the computer. Our query had been overlooked by everyone else initially, but he found it yesterday and answered, obviously a bit too late.
He quite understands that we want to stay put at the Milano, but he wants to take us upstairs to show us the rooms. The hobbit-like entry opens to floors that are unexpectedly vast. The suites are tasteful, even elegant, unlike the Milano, which is a classic old dive by a train station, clean but institutional. The James Joyce has vitality and style. The colors are subtle, the paintings daring, the rooms different in design and ambiance. It is more like a bed-and-breakfast.
Our new companion’s name is Paolo Girol, and he pours us mineral water after which we sit at a table in the tiny lobby talking. He explains the hoopla of our previous night’s experience: Europafest takes place one weekend a year, the reason also why it was hard to find a room. As for our failed restaurant expedition—well, he says, the part of town we were in is mainly wine bars. Beyond the James Joyce, down toward the water, are very good fish and general Italian restaurants.
He is a music-composition student from outside Venezia, going for a Ph.D. at the local university—his instrument is classical guitar. He might like to come study in California next with a professor importante in Santa Barbara.
He lets me use his laptop to get our confirmation number from Auto Europe. Soon enough, as we discuss with him our forthcoming travel plans in the context of this recreational visit to his friend’s hotel, we decide impulsively to book a room at the James Joyce for two nights in early October when we are on our way back from Slovenia, a time we had previously reserved for either one last shot at Venice or an extra couple of days in Slovenia. We schedule dinner with him then, as well.
Elated at this new connection and pleased too by our firming up plans and getting a reservation for two undetermined nights on the horizon (plus dispensing with Venezia in favor of newly favored Trieste once and for all), we leave the James Joyce and work out way down alleys and streets to the waterfront itself. The Adriatic sits right there, pushing against the city with its breeze and enormous water. Later we learn that all of this downtown part of Trieste is landfill on saltpan, a project going back centuries. The original city rests, unvisited yet by us, on a series of hills, including a central one, overlooking its extension into the sea.
Here the interface with the Gulf of Trieste is extremely intimate. The water laps onto pavement and, at one point, there is a broad polished stone staircase descending right into the sea, like a spot Aphrodite might use to submerge or return from a meta-marine passage between dimensions. Several people are wading on the steps, so I take off my shoes and stand in the tide.
Perhaps from my considering the dominance of the three-quarters of the Earth by such water, I feel a mixture of awe and apprehension on the edge of Trieste. There is no gap between land and sea. Pavement ends; water begins maybe a foot or so below it. The pavement is as flat as the sea, and there is no barrier. It is as though every effort has been made not to protect the shoreline, not to separate humankind from its fierce neighbor. In fact the relaxed strolling pedestrians are treating a lion like a pussy-cat. The land is so low; the sea, barely contained, is so high and full and wide. Not only am I tiny against this cosmos of ocean and history, the entire city is but a glyph, a scratch on a rock.
A couple with canes strolls along the very edge, a few millimeters from Okeanos. The sea could hiccough and swallow them. The balance on these stairs feels ninety-hundred-ninety-nine thousandths sea, one thousandth civilization.
The water is really warm on my feet. I feel the tiniest connection, an umbilicus to the blue, the primordial Greek thalatta, the ancient cyan Phoenician and Cretean sea, sea of Roman and Hapsburg empires, and my own itinerant ancestors, some of whom could well have passed through this port en route to Poland or Germany.
We walk back to the Milano, make lunch from our reserve of food (cheese sandwiches, salad, and a big raspberry-centered cookie) and then rest till we set out at 15:10 for our walking tour.
Starting on Via Roma again, we work our way back to Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia through the mobs of Europafest, but are very early, so we sit on a bench beside a statue of the indigenous peoples of the world as known soon after Columbus and watch the pigeons land on its different figures, creating absurd little subtexts and vaudeville with each other and the silent artifact. Kids wrestle roughly before our eyes. Lindy figures out that the more she shows disapproval, the more they pretend to be murdering each other, and the louder they squawk.
We finally go to one of the overpriced cafés and order mineral water and gelatos (lime and coffee ones) 12 euros total, and sit there nursing them and a plate of free macaroons until 16:20.
A group of twelve tourists has gathered at the piazza for the walking tour, almost evenly split between Italian and English speakers, though we are the only Americans. The other English speakers are Australians, two couples traveling together and a separate woman our age who has come back to Trieste to see where her grandfather dwelled and from where he sailed over a century ago. Sadly, she says, the site is now all apartments, no original house left.
The guide is a young woman with a pageboy haircut and a light, slightly playful or irreverent manner (even as she is precise in her diction, scrupulous in her detail, and relentlessly neutral as to any politics subtexted in the things she is describing). We have until 18:30 to complete the itinerary, and the basic course leads, first, through the various connected squares of the downtown, her narration elaborating statues and buildings. Then we detour along the canal, past the Serb Orthodox church with its luminous blue and gold exterior painting and dome; up the steep Colle di San Giusto, past the ruins of the Roman amphitheater to the founding point of the city with its the great mediaeval church and adjacent fortresses, the former incorporating the ruins of a Roman temple. The tour completes itself by our passage down another side of the hill, past other churches, to our starting point.
The advertised roster promises us Piazza Verdi, Borgo Teresiano, Teatro Roman, Colle di San Giusto (climbing up stairs through hairpin alleyways of often fancy apartment to the top of the hill), Via dell Cattedrale, Cittavechhia, and Piazza della Borsa (the business center and stock exchange).
Our chipper, sometimes bemused guide provides each narration and history first in English, then in Italian (while the English speakers peel off and wander about the site). Up on the hill she switches to the reverse. At the end of the tour, she admits that English is her sixth language and fifth-best one for translation. Given that handicap, she is remarkably flawless, lacking but a word here or there.
One can read about Trieste in books (other than Rick Steves’ Italy), so I will recount our journey only in terms of those things that were memorable to me:
The first statue we looked at, the one with the pigeons, actually is the oldest in the city. It is an intentionally amorphous pile of rubbery-looking semi-square blocks that give it an unfinished clay look, capped by a perfectly rendered stone bird of prey, its long, almost-delicate wings shooting out at forty-five degrees from the peak. The statue’s figures, semi-camouflaged in the stone, represent the players of terra orbis as known at the time: an Indian, an African, a lion, a snake or fish navigating downward, a satyr bathing at a fountain, and so on, but, our guide jokes, no Australian Aborigines or Maoris because Australia and New Zealand were uncharted at the time.
Next she points to the sea and a great cruise liner docked along a wharf. This is her cue for a Chamber of Commerce narrative: Trieste was a poor city a century ago, and immigrants mostly sailed from this port for a better life in the States, South America, or Australia. Now people are starting to come here as a tourist destination and even for work. Trieste has awakened and is at the brink of a new renaissance.
In the series of piazzas through which we then trek, she talks about how all these buildings with their elaborate friezework, colonnaded windows, complex porticos, and giant statuaries along rooflines and rising on ledges between windows, are very late by comparison to equivalents of their approximate styles throughout Europe. Trieste was nil, a little colony of 10,000 on a hill until the eighteenth century when, reannointed as a major Hapsburg port, it exploded to 250,000—its prime influences Austrian, not Italian.
We are looking, she explains, at gradations of neo-Baroque, neo-Classical, neo-Byzantine, neo-Gothic, neo-whatever, as well as late Art Nouveau, oftentimes each consecutive grand building on a block a different style, as the architects of Trieste mimicked and riffed improvisationally on what was already parading through Germany, France, Austria, and the like. The overall effect is majestic, palatial, and sumptuous. In this part of town, there are no ordinary structures. All apartment buildings are grand. (Elsewhere, as noted—or as we shall see later—Trieste looks like Siena or even a larger Chiavasso with its commercial strips and crumbling Renaissance edifices.)
On a bridge over the main canal is a bronze life-sized statue of James Joyce slightly hunched and walking. He would be mortified to be so literally epitomized. Jean Cocteau, enemy and creator of statues (and mirrors), would be embarrassed for him, to be posed like this with the post-modern, yellow-shirted vulgar Italian yuppie from our tour, his arm around the author of Finnegan’s Wake, his wife, a cigarette fuming from her mouth and wafting unpleasantly across the group, taking his digital photo. So here is the real price for all those unpaid bills and bad charges! Is this how Trieste decides to sentence the artist as an old man, for the duration, for dying famous, yet leaving rancorous debts in town? The creditors will get their due yet. But what a horrid literary fate!
The saving grace is the plaque onto which JJ will step if he actually begins walking: James Joyce, 1882-1941; at its upper margin: …la mia anima è a Trieste… (Letters a Nora, 27 Ottobre 1909).
It was simply life as lived. He could not affect the outcome.
Now we stand before the Serb church with its multiple Cross-topped cerulean crowns, one great cupola-like one overlooking different levels and scales of other, symmetrically placed colonnade-capped turrets and alcoves with smaller scallop-edged cupolas. Two large haloed saint figurines ascend where arch-topped windows might be on the outer wall, flanking the entrance against gleaming gold-leaf backdrops. Just above the door a haloed angel (of course), made larger by his open wings against the gold, fills the lower half of an intricately-curlicued frieze with a triangular top. The edifice is a contrast of extremely fine stonework and garish imagery and coloring that give it a peculiar quasi-Romanesque, almost Rosicrucian and South Carolina Pentecostal look—a mixture of epic architecture and tarot card.
As we continue around and past this structure, we begin our ascent up snaking stones stairs that will lead us to the mast we view, high above, at the very top of the hill of San Giusto, original fortress Trieste in the sky. Hard to believe we will have stamina for attaining that. Yet it turns out to be less steep than it looks from the base.
Old Trieste is a Roman frontier city, high ground in times of imperial wars, as Trieste was always vulnerable from both the East and the West, Venice after Rome, Vienna after Venice. New Trieste lies on the table of the Adriatic, merely on loan, darling of the global market and fashion industries.
The Roman amphitheater no more than a quarter of the way up the hill, marks the original shoreline. In its moment of long-ago time, plays were put on before the sea—no wonder the modern water seems so omnipresent in much of the downtown.
The structure of the amphitheater is more ruins than stadium, but the basic footprint remains: an eroded wall like a honeycomb with tiny square portals like bar code, jagged gaps in it forty to seventy-five percent of the way to the ground; along its length catacombs and tunnels crumbled into half-catacombs and mere arches. Down below are sleek, slightly rounded rows of benches, probably reconstructed, as others are almost completely missing. As we learn from the guide, plays are put on here on every summer.
At the exposed margins of former cohesions and supports, the decay has the pleasant appearance of lunar pumice, for we are seeing a unique x-ray of masonwork, a cross-section of not only the original skeleton but the effects of wind and water and time on stone, perfectly imprinted as a timelapse snapshot of Trieste onto Rome.
At the top of the hill the view from the old church and fortress is stunning. One can see up and down the coast, its hills densely dotted with towns, castles, towers, apartment cubes squat and giraffe-like, classic Italian reddish pipe-shingled roofs with enigmatic chimney urns, piers, warehouses, the lighthouse. It is a layout that might be seen from a plane.
While we are overlooking the Gulf, the guide answers a question I have been holding in mind since our drive from Siena: what are the dark objects in the water? Up close, she says, they are actually multicolored bars for cultivating mussels. I then ask her about the magnificent stand of trees beside the church. I had never seen nuts like those on them, clustered like berries or marble-size castanets at various nodes of one. Split open, they gave off the pungent aroma of an entire sachet. These, she says, are different species of cypress, very very old.
An Ethiopian or maybe Nigerian teenager sits by the big wooden door to the church, his right foot on a lower step than his left one, a posture which raises his knee to his chin: immobile, impassive, utterly black and lovely, imposing a powerful multi-tiered rebus—old Rome and New Carthage, medieval Rome and the Mediterranean, Italy and Africa, Libyan trade and Catholic missionaries, Mussolini and Qaddafi—a sound of Italian rap faintly rising from the city. Up above him a giant delicately stone-sectored stained-glass floral mandala is imprinted in the mange of the church’s irregular brick.
We pass what is left of a Roman plaza and forum. This is the spot from which the city was ever and again protected from warriors. The hundreds of thousands who died on this front in World War I are commemorated on the hill of San Giusto by a completely black, twisted 1930s statue of stylistic soldiers. The cast fuses three figures, one with his right arm thrown up in the chaos of battle, his left outstretched with a shield; the second a dying companion he is supporting; the third kneeling on a helmet. The war’s date is MCMXV-MCMXVIII
Around the hill, viewed on our descent, a single Roman pillar stands alone among fashionable and run-down apartments. It is the last of its kind, heavy post-punk graffiti on adjoining buildings giving it a surprising free pass.
As is so often the case, my favorite thing on the walk was not listed in the formal itinerary. It is the wooded area on the side of the hill, stretching over a great distance and populated by feral cats that are fed, says the guide, by a single woman. The full import of her aside about cats does not hit until a few moments later we pass the first giant tabbies and black-and-whites sunning themselves and eating from bowls. There are so many and they are all so leonine.
We are very, very lucky. We get to see the saint of gattos in session. A few yards further an old woman manifesting like Clotho of the Fates is pulling goodies from a small sack, filling dishes for her flock of courtesans, probably a dozen or more cats of all varieties, mostly huge, crowded together and touching bodies, more appearing every moment from the complicated background, as she reaches through grillwork to resupply their bowls—a stupendous feline exhibition.
Passing her, we see cats everywhere. The footpath winds in and around wild areas, and you can look at just about any spot and not spot a cat, but then one always appears to longer scrutiny: there under a tree snoozing; two more Cheshirelike up in another tree; three standing altogether, looking like one rock; another prowling behind a bush. It is like a page in a gamebook; the caption tells you to find all the cats disguised in this picture. At first there might seem to be a dozen, but the instructions insist that you can find fifty if you really look.
I can’t tell you how many cats were on this hill, but it had to be in the hundreds if not thousands. Spotting them became my obsession of that phase of the walk. It brought sadness and sympathy both. felt for their plight, though they were clearly happy, even pampered, and I found myself wishing I had contributed some euros when we passed the Lady of Fates herself.
I wonder how this population can be controlled or fed forever, and what will ultimately become of its threatened community, blissfully in its own world, unaware of perils among the doings of men.
After a rest back at the Milano we set out for dinner at one of Paolo’s recommended restaurants, using the map. We actually leave our room at 21:10, so it is going to be a late meal in the local tradition.
To avoid the jam of people along Via Roma and adjacent streets, we route ourselves beside the waterfront. The sea is absolutely black and placid. The human throngs grow until they are thick alongside the Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia. Lindy thinks there might be fireworks at hand, and she will turn out to be right. After we pass the Piazza, we have trouble finding the correct districts for any of the restaurants. The map just won’t bend to the territory. As we pass some punk street scenes, boom boxes and ganga smoke, we hear explosions and see the kids’ sudden shadows in the glow. So we retreat to the Piazza to watch the presentation of fire.
It is a superlative display of choreographed incendiaries. Great bursts of stars of different colors explode through one another in perfect syncopation so that it seems orchestral. The windows of the palatial buildings rattle and resonate as the Piazza thunders with deafening noise, so loud that Lindy and I both react with a start at each new burst, even though it is expected. Globes of stars seem to be flying right at us until they dissolve.
With the explosions unabated, we give up on Paolo’s list and pick a random restaurant down an adjacent alley. We learn later it is a “tourists only” joint. We park ourselves at one of its outside tables and await menus. The waiter is theatrical; it seems that he has been at the game for at least thirty years. He has stock lines in broken English and Italian for everything—every dish on the menu, every romantic cliché—but at least we can send away the musicians with their violins.
The fact that we are worn out and in disarray and simply want to eat fast and get back to our room does not dampen waiter’s ardor. He is up for a long Italian meal with all the extras, so we disappoint. We do not order much, and the highlight is a plate of sections of fish caught that day. Shrimps, swordfish, and octopus are obvious in the mix, arranged in an artful pattern on the plate. Other species are unknown, including one little whole fried flatfish, head, tail, and all.
As we meander back to our room, the festival is packing up. Traffic is reduced, but we still have to dodge hornet cars: You may stand at a red light and look both ways and see nothing. till half the time, before you can hustle across the street, some little vehicle has shot from nowhere like a bullet and is almost upon you before you hit the next curb. We take to waiting for green lights even when no vehicles are apparent in the dark, and even then we look carefully.