Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

descendant of the Giuliani family, in his youth a philosopher and scientist of repute, died in the city in 1835 all alone and forgotten, and in my imagination I see his peers flitting pale and emaciated through their shadowy lanes while the city erupts into fame around them.
    Both classes are unrecognizable now, the vibrant multilingual work force, the attenuated medieval aristocracy. Behind and above them both, though, was that well-heeled business society, solid and earnest, and it flourishes still. It was drawn from many of the peoples that had created the new Trieste, and was sprinkled with nobility old and new. Like the governing classes of Chicago and Manchester, it interested itself assiduously in the arts. The city was rich in theatres and concert-halls, and nothing was too high-brow for their audiences. Ibsen, Strindberg, Wagner were all much admired in Trieste. Toscanini, Nikisch and Mahler all conducted here. One of the very first subscribers to Joyce’s bewilderingly demanding Ulysses was the Triestine Greek entrepreneur Ambrogio Ralli, who had to read the book in English, and without any of the explanatory glosses that have alone made it intelligible to most of us. The City Library, with a famous collection of books and manuscripts, was always busy; the Conservatoire of Music was never short of pupils; language schools were in great demand—even Esperanto was popular; the Università Popolare, although it was not really a university, offered public lectures that were attended by thousands of citizens. Scores of cultural institutions flourished, from the scholarly society called the Gabinetto Minerva to debating clubs and a civic madrigal society. Lloyd Adriatico took time off from the ocean trade to publish a series of classic literature. When the Trieste Yacht Works found that a debtor could not pay the bill for his boat repairs, its directors accepted an Egyptian sarcophagus instead, and passed it on to the city.
    Opera was immensely popular, and the masterly beadle at the Teatro Verdi, calling up carriages in his powdered wig, was one of the city’s archetypal characters. The opera house itself was a distinguished institution, with a roster of eminent conductors. It was the first anywhere to rename itself after Verdi, and two of his works had their first performances in it (patrons preferred to forget that he didn’t bother to attend the opening night of one, Il Corsaro , and later rewrote the other, Stiffelio . . .). The business families of Trieste were fervent opera-goers. When Joyce went to a performance, to sit among the “sour reek of armpits” and “phosphorescent farts” of the upper balcony, he often saw in the stalls and boxes below bourgeois pupils of his, following the music with extreme attention: they had probably read the libretto beforehand, and very likely knew the scores too.
    These were the great days of the Viennese cafés, as ubiquitous and as popular here as they were in the capital. Trieste was always a bar town, a restaurant town (though hardly a gourmet’s paradise) and especially a coffee-shop town. There had been at least one hundred licensed cafés as early as 1830, and some of them still survive—the Historic Cafés of Trieste, as the tourist people call them now. The Tommaseo, the degli Specchi, the Tergeste, the Stella Polare, the San Marco, all date from Habsburg times, and maintain the high bourgeois tradition. The most suggestive of them is the Caffè San Marco, which is where students and writers still like to drink, talk, work and show themselves off to visitors. When I enter its doors out of the noisy Via Battisti, I feel I am among just the same customers, mutatis mutandis , as would have been there a century ago: the students with their text-books spread around them, the professors reading the day’s newspapers, the odd author sucking his pen meditatively over his novel, a scattering of ladies enjoying their daily coffee-talk and one or two flaky philosophers