Trieste by Night

April 23, Monday. I decided to make the most of being in the Fruili region, the north-easternmost in Italy, by spending a night at a cheap backpacker’s in Trieste, a once great sea-port city overlooking the vast Adriatic Sea.

My reasons for going to Trieste were three-fold:

1. It is a fairly out-of-the way place, usually overlooked on the tourist trail – the approach from Venice, by rail or road, skirts the highest cliffs in Italy, overlooking the Adriatic. If the breathtaking beauty of the winding roads in and around Queenstown in NZ where anything to go by, I trusted the guidebooks when they said that the trip was severely underrated. Add to this Trieste’s location in the furthest reaches of north-eastern Italy, and I figured that, since I wasn’t coming this way again any time soon, then why the hell not.

2. In truth, it was Trieste’s literary cache, just as much as its location, that drew me there – particularly, the fact that it was Irish literary great James Joyce’s place of self-imposed ‘exile’. It was here that Joyce worked on Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, while tutoring students from noble families.

3. After doing my research, I also discovered that within striking distance of Trieste, barely half an hour by bus, stands the Duino Castle – that inspired the German poet Rainer Mariner Rilke to write the Duino Elegies, one of the great poem-series of the last century. This sealed it for me, and I decided I’d spend the night in Trieste, and make a day trip to the Duino Castle – a literary pilgrimage, you might say. The thirty-six hours I subsequently spent in and around Trieste turned out to be some of the most exhilarating of my life.

Trieste was not part of Italy until last century (when Italy looked at the great western powers, saw that they had colonized much of Africa, and indeed many other parts of the world, and felt that she should also get in on the action – though my somewhat flippant interpretation of the rise of expansionist fascism is of course debatable). It is probably worth contextualizing this by stressing that Italy didn’t officially exist as a unified nation until 1870.

Judging by its architecture, Trieste clearly cashed in as a major port. The major piazza overlooking the sea seems to rival the Piazza San Marco in Venice, for size, and nearly for grandeur.