Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere Read Online Free

we go out for our first daylight drift through town, if the weather is friendly we shall find it far more benign than we did last night. Those overbearing structures do not seem so severe, when sunshine and shadow flicker through the arcades, and the mathematical street plans turn out to possess a certain elegance. Nobody could call Trieste a picturesque or exquisite city. It has no lovely city parks and few buildings that you feel you could pick up, to my mind a characteristic of great architecture—think of the Chrysler Building, or the Doge’s Palace, or the Romanesque chapels of Spain! When the sun shines, however, Trieste does have charm. As in all cities built to grid patterns, it can be difficult to know where you are, which way you are facing, whether the sea is this way or that: but often enough the wooded slopes of the Karst appear between the buildings, to set you more or less straight, or there is a glimpse of blue water across an intersection.
    The city’s first eighteenth-century planners built a neat pattern of streets around a short canal, the Canal Grande, which intruded into the city from the sea and was to provide safe moorings for sea-going ships, whatever the weather. This arrangement is still a pleasure to discover. The canal runs inland for a few hundred yards from the bay, and it is only about thirty feet wide, but handsome Neo-classical buildings line it, and at the end there stands a domed church, with Ionic columns in a grand portico, which gives a touch of ceremony to the ensemble. The canal is full of small boats, some of them half-submerged, a few actually sunk, almost all needing a lick of paint; three or four of the most derelict, hauled out of the water at the entrance to the canal, have been so splashed with vivid paints and graffiti, and are disposed so gracefully there, that they look like works of contemporary art. The canal quays are lively enough, if a bit shabby, and half-way up there is an outdoor market in a square, with mounds of fruit and vegetables, racks of dresses, flowers, socks and Mars bars.
    Not too bad, you may think, your spirits rising rather. It is true that later architectural developments are less jolly even in the daylight—piles of nineteenth-century commerce, arid exercises in twentieth-century monumentalism—but there are many cheerful incidentals and exceptions. Perambulating central Trieste may not be exhilarating, but it is seldom dull. The lumpish offices of the city’s boom days are still comically resplendent, inside and out, with allegorical images of aspiration and success. The private houses of long-dead bankers or shipowners, Gothic, Neo-classic or defiantly eclectic, stand on advantageous corners in glorious grandiloquence. Exercises in Art Nouveau, called here the Liberty Style, display gigantic bare-busted ladies guarding doorways or precariously ornamenting ledges. What’s this, now? A Roman amphitheatre. Who’s that? Verdi, composing, on a plinth in a garden. Which way are we going? Search me.
    It is easy to get away from it all, anyway. Take a lane into città yecchia , the Old City, clamber up its steep slope through a mi-nuscule piazza, like a village square with groceries and bric-a-brac stores in it, skirt a Roman archway and a couple of churches, and soon we shall find ourselves on the flat summit of St. Giusto’s hillock, where the citadel is, and the cathedral. This was the original city centre, but for the moment it need not, as the old Baedekers used to say, long detain us. As a whole it has a laboured institutional air. The Romans built their forum up here, and there are a few carefully repositioned columns around, together with war memorials, cemeteries, gardens of remembrance, a collection of armour, a lapidary museum and other such municipal essentials. Still, the air is fresh and the views are fine: and when we have seen enough, and taken a cup of coffee at one of the outdoor stalls in the cathedral piazza, it is agreeable to