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PHOTOGRAPHS PHILIP LEE HARVEY
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TO WHOM DOES THE CITY OF TRIESTE BELONG? Maps show it belongs to Italy, right on the eastern edge, dangling from the rest of the country by a thin thread of territory. Ask the citizens of Rome or Milan, and you get a different answer. A 1999 poll showed 70 per cent of Italians believed Trieste does not count as Italy. Open a history book, and you can understand this confusion. In little over a century, Trieste has belonged to Austria-Hungary, Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia, become a free port under UK and US administration and, now, belongs to Italy again. It is a place where residents blinked and found their passports had changed colour.
The apsidal mosaic in the Cathedral of San Giusto, depicting Christ between St Justus and St Servulus. Opposite: A view from Miramare Castle
In many ways Trieste belongs to writers, for whom its statelessness was inspiration. Jan Morris calls Trieste ‘the capital of nowhere’ – a city lost ‘on a fold of a map’ whose shifting identity signified all of Europe, maybe all of the world. It has teleported writers to faraway places: James Joyce wrote Dubliners as a resident; Richard Burton dreamed of the gardens of Damascus and translated Arabian Nights here. Sigmund Freud wrote about the sex lives of eels in Trieste, but I digress.
Today it is a prosperous city with few major sights, but a place perfectly suited to aimless exploration along windy quays, pondering monuments to fallen empires. It is, I’d suggest, one of the most secretly beautiful cities in Italy – though, of course, some would dispute whether it is in Italy at all.