Travel

The Adriatic port city of Trieste, with its heady mix of Italian, Germanic and Slavic cultures, transcends nationhood to become the perfect place for self-exile. By David Sornig.

Falling through time in Trieste

Caffè San Marco in Trieste.

Credit: Stefano Politi Markovina / Alamy

On my first morning in Trieste, I see an elderly woman fall from the kerb in front of the UPIM department store, onto the busy Corso Italia. By the time I reach her, someone is already giving her water; someone else has called the paramedics. The welt on her elbow doesn’t look so good. It isn’t long before the ambulance tears around the corner from the waterfront and I take the chance to excuse myself. While everyone and everything has been in action, the best I’ve managed is to flub the conjugation of Italian verbs.

I know one or two things about Trieste. The first is that it was the Italian port on the Adriatic from which my Austrian father sailed for Australia in 1954. I have a photo of him on the waterfront with a group of strangers. He’s 23 years old and has just left the small world he’s dwelt in all his life – just a hundred kilometres away on the Carinthian-Slovene border – headed for the land in which my own as-yet unimagined existence would unfold.

When it did unfold – that is, when I eventually became something of an adult – I took up Italian citizenship through my Italian-born wife. Lately, the question of what kind of Italian I am has become important to me.

The same question has lingered about Trieste for centuries. This is the second thing I know about it. While its backbone has become firmly Italian, Trieste’s other histories – Friulian, Slovene, Germanic Austrian, Serb, Greek, Jewish, Croat – remain a part of its flesh and its face. It is defined by its anomalousness.

The day after the woman falls, I meet up with Alessandro, who is part of the next generation of the Italian family I inherited when I married. He’s not from Trieste, but he might as well be. We stop in at the Caffè San Marco. He’s right in having imagined I’d feel at home in its Austro–Hungarian irreality: its coffee bustle, its art nouveau wood panelling, its books, mirrors, marble tables and dim lamps. It was once a hotspot of anti-Austrian Italian irredentism. The Triestine author Claudio Magris, San Marco’s best-known literary habitué, sets the first of his densely allusive essays in the 1997 collection Microcosms in the cafe. He writes, approvingly, of Trieste’s reputation for giving visitors “the impression of being nowhere”.

After coffee, Alessandro and I walk around to the tangled – and previously sordid – Cavana district, then up to the ancient heart of the city on the San Giusto Hill. We finally descend into the cool public gardens, where a group of young Christian missionary women sit gossiping pleasantly in the shade. Alessandro and I talk about a lot of things: his Japanese bass guitar, Triestine commercial sign typography, the dangerous heat of moral certainty. We talk as well about the third thing I know about Trieste: James Joyce.

The great writer lived in Trieste for the first decade of his self-imposed Irish exile. While the only thing he ever wrote directly about the city was the posthumously published Giacomo Joyce – a prose poem about his affection for one of his Triestine students – the city’s traces in the Dublin of Ulysses are unmissable. Now, with its Joyce statues, museum, hotel, plaques, neon signs and souvenirs, Trieste is at the point of Joycean saturation.

Later, I walk alone to the waterfront, imagining my skinny and bare-legged father in that photo. There is the same long port building jutting into the Adriatic. At dock, a German cruise ship, implausibly monstrous in scale, groans into life. Out in the bay, a futuristic superyacht, seized from a Russian billionaire, languishes at anchor.

On the Riva del Mandracchio, I pivot and see what my father must have been looking at in the photo: the grand rectangular void of the Piazza Unità. Just weeks before the photo was taken, the piazza had seen the culmination of Trieste’s century of turmoil.

This turmoil is the fourth thing I know.

For the generation before my father’s, Trieste had, for centuries, been the Austro-Hungarian empire’s cosmopolitan port to the world. When the empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the city was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy, and fell to Mussolini’s repressive campaign of Italianisation. The closing years of World War II saw its occupation by Germans, from whom it was liberated by both Yugoslav partisan and New Zealand forces. From 1947 it achieved nominal independence as the southern finial of Churchill’s Iron Curtain – a free territory split between British–American and Yugoslav military administrations. Nationalist tensions, fuelled by the recent memory of war, retributive massacre and ethnic expulsions – all magnified by the geopolitical divides of the Cold War – often erupted into communal violence.

Italy finally reclaimed Trieste under the terms of the London Memorandum in October 1954. It was just weeks before my father’s transit through the city. The Piazza Unità had thronged with tens of thousands of celebrating Triestine Italians.

I’ve watched the newsreels of the event and don’t know if I could ever be that kind of Italian, launching into the wilful and tumultuous tide of mass jubilation. All that violent desire for certainty. I’d like to think it was another time. It’s a fact, though, that the borders of Italy have not changed since.

Today, on the nearby Piazza della Borsa, a sign pleads for the return of British–American forces as governors of a reinstated Free Territory of Trieste. The pipe dream of reclaiming a fluid and independent Triestine multiethnicity ignores historical, legal and political facts. It’s a place that has never existed, but I see the appeal of a nostalgic irreality.

It’s on my last late afternoon in Trieste, returning from another long morning at the Caffè San Marco and its illusory reality, that I see another elderly woman tumble heavily to the pavement. This time, I run to help. I am met at her side by a Sri Lankan priest who has stepped out of Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo, the imposing neoclassical church that overlooks and completes the symmetry of the crepuscularly melancholic Canal Grande. As we help the woman to her feet, we see that her knee is bleeding. I dash to a nearby pharmacy with a translation for bandaid in my phone (Cerotto!) and when I return another woman, a nurse, cleans and patches up the injury. I find myself speaking in Italian with them, telling them I am Australian. The fallen woman remembers she has a cousin in Australia. I manage to say as well that I am Italian. God bless you, the woman says in English – it seems a bit much for the little I’ve done.

What a peculiar symmetry: these two in their falling, and their landing in this gentle blessing of welcome. I find my way back to the UPIM store for no reason but to flick idly through its racks of fast fashion. I learn later, in idly flicking, that not only had James Joyce lived in that very building, but it was where, in 1907, he had delivered up that most exquisite end to “The Dead”, with all its transcendent yearning, beyond the somewhereness of nations, for the nowhereness of the all. How deeply I feel it too, that most Triestine of desires.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 13, 2025 as "Falling through time".

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