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Trieste
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Backed by the green and white cliffs of a limestone plateau and facing the blue Adriatic,
TRIESTE
has a potentially idyllic setting; close up, however, the place reveals uninviting water and an atmosphere of run-down haughtiness. The city itself is rather strange: a capitalist creation built to play a role that no longer exists, though like so many ports in Europe, the seediness that long prevailed is now giving way to a nascent optimism. Trieste was Tergeste to the Romans, who captured it in 178 BC, but although signs of their occupancy are scattered throughout the city (the theatre off Corso Italia, for instance, and the arch by Piazza Barbacan), what strikes you straightaway is its modernity. With the exception of the castle and cathedral of San Giusto, and the tiny medieval quarter below, the city's whole pre-nineteenth-century history seems dim and vague beside the massive Neoclassical architecture of the
Borgo Teresiano
- the name given to the modern city centre, after Empress Maria Theresa (1740-80), who initiated the development.
Trieste was constructed largely with Austrian capital to serve as the Habsburg Empire's southern port. It briefly eclipsed Venice as the Adriatic's northern port, but its brief heyday drew to a close after 1918, when it finally became Italian and discovered that, for all its good intentions, Italy had no economic use for it. The city languished for sixty years, and is only now making a new role for itself. Computer-based firms are cropping up while seaborne trade goes through the container port on the south side of Trieste, leaving the old quays as windblown car parks.
Lying on the political and ethnic fault-line between the Latin and Slavic worlds, Trieste has long been a city of political extremes. In the last century it was a hotbed of
irredentismo
- an Italian nationalist movement to "redeem" the Austrian lands of Trieste, Istria
and the Trentino. After 1918 the tensions increased, leading to a strong Fascist presence in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Yugoslavia and the Allies fought over Trieste until 1954, when the city and a connecting strip of coast were secured for Italy, though a definitive border settlement was not reached until 1975. Tito kept the Istrian peninsula, whose fearful Italian population emigrated in huge numbers: Fiume (Rijeka), for example, lost 58,000 of its 60,000 Italians. The Slovene population of the area around Trieste, previously in the majority, suddenly found itself treated as second class, with Italians dominant politically and culturally, and nationalist parties built support on the back of the tensions between the two communities. The neo-Fascist MSI party does well here, and Trieste shocked the rest of Italy in February 2000 by inviting Jorg Haider, founder of Austria's right-wing Freedom Party to the city. Yet nationalism has long provoked the development of its antithesis and there is an intense socialist and intellectual tradition which is intimately connected with the city's cafe culture. Numerous foreign writers based themselves around Trieste, most famously James Joyce
, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and native literati include Umberto Saba and Italo Svevo. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Italy,
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