with spectacles, sitting there hour after hour gazing at Time. If the empire still existed, an habitué once remarked to the writer Claudio Magris (as recorded in his book Microcosms) , “the world would still be a Caffè San Marco, and don’t you think that’s something, if you take a look out there?”
It was a fine time and place for promenading, too. Trieste women were famously well-dressed, in local variants of Vienna fashions, and were good at showing themselves off. They loved to walk their husbands along the sea on summer evenings, or catch the tram up to the Obelisk to saunter along the ridge, or take an educational stroll around the city’s fountains, or (a favourite evening recreation) visit the extraordinary collection of oriental objets d’art that Adolf Wünsch from Moravia displayed above his pasticceria on the Corso. Families would spend a day picnicking in the hill-side park that Baron Revoltella had bequeathed to the city, where the grown-ups could pay their respects to the magnate and his mother, safe in their tombs in their private chapel, while the children could play for hours with the turtles in the pool outside.
THE LEGACIES of this society are still inescapable in Trieste. The families may be extinct, but many of their names are still part of the civic vocabulary, and sometimes their memories live. “Who’s that?” I asked the man behind the counter at the Cosulich Travel Agency on the Via Rossini, pointing to a photograph of a prosperous-looking gentleman on the wall behind his back. “That’s one of the bosses,” he said—and he was referring to the Cosulich brothers, shipowners who died generations before he was born.
One can still follow the trails of those happy promenades. Revoltella’s chapel reminds me of one of those memorial churches that Russians used to erect on battlefields in the days of the Czars, and the turtles are still a delight. The Opicina tram still braves the 26 percent gradient up to the Obelisk, shoved along in the steepest part by a funicular engine. Even a tour of the city fountains can still be fun. Like most such nineteenth-century merchant cities Trieste was lavishly ornamented with civic fountains, but their careers have been precarious because they have constantly been moved as times or tastes have demanded. One year they are spouting in the Piazza della Borsa, the next they are in the Piazza Venezia—I once chanced to see a mobile crane in the very act of lifting the mountainous centre-piece of the Fountain of the Four Continents, to shift it from one spot to another in the Piazza Unità. The one symbolical fountain-figure that can feel reasonably safe is the little putto in the Piazza Ponterosso, beside the Canal Grande: but then Giovannini del Ponterosso has been there since 1753, before bourgeois Trieste existed, and he has long been so beloved among Triestini of all classes that his tenure seems secure.
Most of the civic statuary proudly commemorates the old bourgeoisie, and properly represents its values. My own tastes run to swagger in public monuments—a few admirals and equestrian generals, a duke or two, soldiers indomitable in life, magnificent in death. Habsburg Trieste was not a swaggering city, though, and its Valhalla is reserved for worthies, preferably respectable and responsible citizens of art or learning. Its earthly annexe is the Public Garden at the top of the Via Cesare Battisti, whose gates are guarded by the grandest worthy of them all. Domenico Rossetti, who died in 1842, was of aristocratic origin actually, but as journalist, scholar, historian, humanist, antiquarian and public benefactor he became the great champion of the bourgeois civilization in Trieste. He gave valuable books to the City Library, he founded the Gabinetto Minerva, he financed the tree-shaded boulevard now called Viale XX Settembre, which is still a pleasant place to sit on a hot day and write a philological thesis. Near the top of it is the Politeama
It was a fine time and place for promenading, too. Trieste women were famously well-dressed, in local variants of Vienna fashions, and were good at showing themselves off. They loved to walk their husbands along the sea on summer evenings, or catch the tram up to the Obelisk to saunter along the ridge, or take an educational stroll around the city’s fountains, or (a favourite evening recreation) visit the extraordinary collection of oriental objets d’art that Adolf Wünsch from Moravia displayed above his pasticceria on the Corso. Families would spend a day picnicking in the hill-side park that Baron Revoltella had bequeathed to the city, where the grown-ups could pay their respects to the magnate and his mother, safe in their tombs in their private chapel, while the children could play for hours with the turtles in the pool outside.
THE LEGACIES of this society are still inescapable in Trieste. The families may be extinct, but many of their names are still part of the civic vocabulary, and sometimes their memories live. “Who’s that?” I asked the man behind the counter at the Cosulich Travel Agency on the Via Rossini, pointing to a photograph of a prosperous-looking gentleman on the wall behind his back. “That’s one of the bosses,” he said—and he was referring to the Cosulich brothers, shipowners who died generations before he was born.
One can still follow the trails of those happy promenades. Revoltella’s chapel reminds me of one of those memorial churches that Russians used to erect on battlefields in the days of the Czars, and the turtles are still a delight. The Opicina tram still braves the 26 percent gradient up to the Obelisk, shoved along in the steepest part by a funicular engine. Even a tour of the city fountains can still be fun. Like most such nineteenth-century merchant cities Trieste was lavishly ornamented with civic fountains, but their careers have been precarious because they have constantly been moved as times or tastes have demanded. One year they are spouting in the Piazza della Borsa, the next they are in the Piazza Venezia—I once chanced to see a mobile crane in the very act of lifting the mountainous centre-piece of the Fountain of the Four Continents, to shift it from one spot to another in the Piazza Unità. The one symbolical fountain-figure that can feel reasonably safe is the little putto in the Piazza Ponterosso, beside the Canal Grande: but then Giovannini del Ponterosso has been there since 1753, before bourgeois Trieste existed, and he has long been so beloved among Triestini of all classes that his tenure seems secure.
Most of the civic statuary proudly commemorates the old bourgeoisie, and properly represents its values. My own tastes run to swagger in public monuments—a few admirals and equestrian generals, a duke or two, soldiers indomitable in life, magnificent in death. Habsburg Trieste was not a swaggering city, though, and its Valhalla is reserved for worthies, preferably respectable and responsible citizens of art or learning. Its earthly annexe is the Public Garden at the top of the Via Cesare Battisti, whose gates are guarded by the grandest worthy of them all. Domenico Rossetti, who died in 1842, was of aristocratic origin actually, but as journalist, scholar, historian, humanist, antiquarian and public benefactor he became the great champion of the bourgeois civilization in Trieste. He gave valuable books to the City Library, he founded the Gabinetto Minerva, he financed the tree-shaded boulevard now called Viale XX Settembre, which is still a pleasant place to sit on a hot day and write a philological thesis. Near the top of it is the Politeama
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