28 January 2008
day trip to trieste
He liked to remember his happy days and spoke preferably of Trieste. His thoughts lingered on this topic with delight. There for a few short years he had enjoyed some moments of respite; fate had spared him some time. This pretty, good-natured Austrian city, half-slavic and half-Italian (Edmund Gosse termed this "life in Germany"), with the gaiety of the Midi, the medley of languages, the animation of a harbour, and an already exotic, oriental flavour (as Veronese's Venice), had given him an extreme pleasure: there were no classical monuments, no Roman mementoes as in Split or Ancona. But there was the rock of Ithaca, and on the sea, the sail of Ulysses - Louis Gillet on Joyce
By the time we reached Trieste from Ljubljana, it felt like summer had already begun. Although not quite as obsessively tidy as the Slovenian city, the faded glamour of the seafront city across the border had its own inimical order.
Closed for the holiday season, with no Joyce or Svevo museum to visit, we nevertheless made the most of the squares and public spaces.
Children seemed to be absent from the city, though we were later to be proved wrong on this account.
Trieste was for him a little Ireland which he was able to contemplate with more detachment than he could his own country - Italo Svevo on Joyce
At least one of us was overjoyed by the revelation that the city of Trieste enjoyed its pigs in various ways.
The semiotics of a tawdry Catholicism mingled peaceably with scooters and cars.
Later that day we stumbled upon a strange kind of celebration, for what we never found out. Coloured strips of paper were blasted from a canon in one of the central squares.
Italy was currently without government. A cartoon in that morning's Il Manifesto contained the following exchange between two characters: 'Prodi's gone and Berlusconi is not yet here'...'let us enjoy this beautiful moment'.
Amongst the ticker-tape, a colourful band played off-kilter marches whilst children dressed as animals danced around them.
In the completely evacuated Il Museo Revoltella, which featured some exceedingly strange paintings from between the two world wars, there hung an extract from Plato's Symposium.
Billboards...
Trains...The dishevelled Romanian train to Budapest, with its The Lady Vanishes carriages got us back to Ljubljana just before 2am. The city was deserted.
