Rossetti, one of the city’s two main theatres, and Rossetti himself stands in bronze sentinel over the main gate of the nearby garden. There he is, complacent on his pedestal with a cloak romantically over his shoulders and a forefinger keeping his place in a book, while clambering about his plinth, and flying over it, nymphs or graces reach out to him with olive branches and a flaming torch.
Sheltering behind this high priest of the culture are less executive acolytes. There are twenty-one of them, writers, artists, educators, scientists, musicians, each with his own portrait bust beneath the trees. Most of them are known only in Trieste, a few are internationally famous, but they all stand there, spattered by pigeons, attended by many cats, serenaded by ducks from the duck-pond, with an air of grave dependability. Even Joyce, the one outsider among them, is somehow admitted to the Establishment by the provision of a bronze picture-frame around his head.
ALL IN all Habsburg Trieste was a complete and interesting city, and its citizens were proud of it. Theirs was an age of burgeoning, confident municipalities throughout the industrialized world, with strong municipal governments that made some of them almost city-states. In Trieste the degree of autonomy achieved long before was transmuted into something called municipalismo , a conscious sense of separateness that still exists. This was an innovative, technological place, not hampered by nostalgia, and like the Chicagos and the Manchesters it looked eagerly to the future. Its young intellectuals were much taken with the ideas of the Futurist Filippo Marinetti, who believed in a fresh start for everything, artistically, politically, socially, historically. Marinetti in return thought of Trieste as an ideal model for his explosive theories, and called it la nostra bella polveriera , “our beautiful powder-magazine.” In 1910 a great Futurist meeting was held in the Politeama Rossetti, and half the local intelligentsia attended it. Most of them thought Marinetti went rather too far in demanding the burning of libraries and the flooding of museums, but nevertheless he was right in judging this a society by no means shackled in tradition.
Trieste had its own language, and this helped to heighten the sense of civic completeness. Triestino was descended from the Venetian dialect, and was similarly rich in slur and sibilant, but it had absorbed words and idioms from the many other languages of this municipal melting-pot (sonababic meant “son-of-a-bitch”). It was not simply a lingua franca of the uneducated, but was commonly used by people of all ranks and resources, in many subtle inflexions—even the Austrians had their own version of it, known as Austriacans . Poetry was written in it, speeches were made in it, and to understand it was a mark of civic membership (James Joyce was fluent, and apparently made use of it in the neo-language of Finnegans Wake) .
The dialect lives on, and so does the familial kind of civic identity. Educated, respectable middle-class citizens still set the style of Trieste, and mould much of its life in their own image. Remember those comfortable rentiers and professionals we saw at their victuals on our first evening in Trieste? I may have been wrong about them, for when I dined there on another evening a table-full of citizens just as respectable, just as discreet, turned out to be writers one and all. Conversely I may be wrong about the customers at the Caffè San Marco too—those professors are probably company accountants really, the novelist is preparing a computer programme and the sages are not contemplating Time, but waiting for the football on TV. With this superficial homogenization goes a more real general pride in the city, and interest in it. Hundreds turn out when they are asked to help clean up the city streets. Books and pamphlets about Trieste pour from the local presses: one published in 1999 contained a local general
Sheltering behind this high priest of the culture are less executive acolytes. There are twenty-one of them, writers, artists, educators, scientists, musicians, each with his own portrait bust beneath the trees. Most of them are known only in Trieste, a few are internationally famous, but they all stand there, spattered by pigeons, attended by many cats, serenaded by ducks from the duck-pond, with an air of grave dependability. Even Joyce, the one outsider among them, is somehow admitted to the Establishment by the provision of a bronze picture-frame around his head.
ALL IN all Habsburg Trieste was a complete and interesting city, and its citizens were proud of it. Theirs was an age of burgeoning, confident municipalities throughout the industrialized world, with strong municipal governments that made some of them almost city-states. In Trieste the degree of autonomy achieved long before was transmuted into something called municipalismo , a conscious sense of separateness that still exists. This was an innovative, technological place, not hampered by nostalgia, and like the Chicagos and the Manchesters it looked eagerly to the future. Its young intellectuals were much taken with the ideas of the Futurist Filippo Marinetti, who believed in a fresh start for everything, artistically, politically, socially, historically. Marinetti in return thought of Trieste as an ideal model for his explosive theories, and called it la nostra bella polveriera , “our beautiful powder-magazine.” In 1910 a great Futurist meeting was held in the Politeama Rossetti, and half the local intelligentsia attended it. Most of them thought Marinetti went rather too far in demanding the burning of libraries and the flooding of museums, but nevertheless he was right in judging this a society by no means shackled in tradition.
Trieste had its own language, and this helped to heighten the sense of civic completeness. Triestino was descended from the Venetian dialect, and was similarly rich in slur and sibilant, but it had absorbed words and idioms from the many other languages of this municipal melting-pot (sonababic meant “son-of-a-bitch”). It was not simply a lingua franca of the uneducated, but was commonly used by people of all ranks and resources, in many subtle inflexions—even the Austrians had their own version of it, known as Austriacans . Poetry was written in it, speeches were made in it, and to understand it was a mark of civic membership (James Joyce was fluent, and apparently made use of it in the neo-language of Finnegans Wake) .
The dialect lives on, and so does the familial kind of civic identity. Educated, respectable middle-class citizens still set the style of Trieste, and mould much of its life in their own image. Remember those comfortable rentiers and professionals we saw at their victuals on our first evening in Trieste? I may have been wrong about them, for when I dined there on another evening a table-full of citizens just as respectable, just as discreet, turned out to be writers one and all. Conversely I may be wrong about the customers at the Caffè San Marco too—those professors are probably company accountants really, the novelist is preparing a computer programme and the sages are not contemplating Time, but waiting for the football on TV. With this superficial homogenization goes a more real general pride in the city, and interest in it. Hundreds turn out when they are asked to help clean up the city streets. Books and pamphlets about Trieste pour from the local presses: one published in 1999 contained a local general
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