Visiting Italy: Trieste and Jan Morris

In the Telegraph recently, an interview with Michael Dobbs on visiting Trieste, Italy. Dobbs recommends the Hapsburg coffee shops and local wine; he also suggests Jan Morris' Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Morris' book praises the pleasantly melancholic qualities of Trieste as a once-signficant port city faded into obscurity:

via Wikimedia Commons

I cannot always see Trieste in my mind's eye. Who can? It is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination. It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar memory, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name everyone knows.

The review at Amazon tend to complain that the city is not as melancholic as Morris makes it out to be. I spent several years in a small, decaying farm town fairly recently and found it paradoxically energizing. It was just as lonely as early adulthood can be in a large city, but without the pressure to take advantage of 'culture' (i.e. shopping and restaurants), I saved money and got a lot more work done. It's not a perfect comparison, but it does seem to me that there is a liberating aspect to obscurity that is neglected.

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