I palazzi bianchi, qua e là l'arancione ambrato dei tetti, Trieste scende con maestosa lentezza incontro al suo mare.

Evoking the whole of its modern history, from its explosive growth to wealth and fame under the Habsburgs, through the years of Fascist rule to the miserable years of the Cold War, when rivalries among the great powers prevented its creation as a free city under United Nations auspices, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is neither a history nor a travel book; like the place, it is one of a kind. A poignant and enchanting evocation of a life, inspired by a beautifully written meditation on a unique city.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. A beautifully written book by Jan Morris about a city I have always wanted to visit for some inexplicable reason, but now having read the book I have no reason to go there. It’s easy to tell your own story about a place, and easy to impart a history lesson, but very hard to make your own experiences interesting and relevant to a general audience.

I was a simple British patriot in those days – even Wales was subsumed in my idea of a benevolent and majestic British nation-state, benign suzerain of an unexampled empire, headed by a monarch everyone respected, led at that time by a charismatic champion, victorious as ever and destined to live happily ever after … In short, my views were probably much like those of most Britons of my age and kind, at the end of the Second World War. A very, very long time ago, I read a trilogy by a man name James Morris, the sublime Pax Britannica.The false passion of the nation-state made my conceptual Europe no more than a chimera: and because of nationality the city around me that day, far from being a member of some mighty ideal whole, was debilitated in loneliness. Trieste also had a large Jewish community as well as a largely Italian population even as it was governed from Vienna and was surrounded by Slovenian and Croatian populations. Al soffio della bora, Jan Morris ha avvertito i molteplici spiriti della città agitarsi: fiera e ambigua, squallida e aristocratica, ospitale e razzista, latina e slava, occidentale e orientale, maschile e femminile. They divorced after Morris’ sex reassignment surgery, but remained together and later became civil partners when those partnerships were legalized in Wales. When Franz Ferdinand died in Sarajevo that morning in 1914, ringing the death knell of European civilisation, which ship brought him back to Trieste for the final overland journey to Vienna?

This is Jan Morris‘s melancholy love letter to a city that was formed by a dozen different civilizations over the course of four thousand years but seems not to belong to any of them.She first visited Trieste as James Morris, a 19 year old member of the British military at the end of World War II. Nostalgia pentru sensul imperial al unui oras-port liber, a carui ghilde si banci s-au dezvoltat sub semnul ordinii si birocratiei atente a dublei monarhii, K und K, inmultind averile si conectandu-l cu intreaga lume. And something a friend of my mother’s once said, that has stuck with me since 16, about people distilling to the essence of who they are as they age, feels true rather than abstract now. It seems that it existed on two planes for her – the real (when she was there) and the imagined (when she was away).

In this book, she does all of that, and ties in some of the most significant part of her life's journey too. The message, which had been agreed upon in advance to protect their scoop, said “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement. In the chapter titled “Only the Band Plays On”, she vividly imagines a scene taking place in the Piazza Unità, a large public square facing the sea, in 1897. A few years later, the ringing words of Churchill’s Fulton speech floated down across the decades in grainy black-and-white on BBC: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Morris tells all these stories and more, bringing the city's past to life; no one should be surprised if Trieste sees more visitors thanks to her spirited study.When Churchill got specific in his "Iron Curtain" speech, he said that line dividing democracy and Communism stretched from Stettin to Trieste. Trieste is portrayed as a melancholy place, a kind of 'nowhere' that has passed through changes of history and geography until it ended up with no real place to belong. Its 19th century attitude was one of non-conformity, something that has carried forward beyond the city’s industrial heyday. De seu título completo «Trieste e o significado de lugar nenhum», agora editado pela Tinta-da-China com tradução da minha lavra, este é o último livro de Jan Morris, nascida James Morris em 1926 e falecida em 2020. A escolha desta dupla pertença nacional é propositada dando destaque à ao passado e ao presente desta cidade, que a autora retrata magistralmente.