Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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The canal is full of small boats, almost all needing a lick of paint; three or four of the most derelict, hauled out of the water at the entrance to the canal, have been so splashed with vivid paints and graffiti, and are disposed so gracefully there, that they look like works of contemporary art.

Both were cosmopolitan port cities that were created out of fiat from small towns, by the Catherine the Great and the Hapsburg Emperor respectively. She was also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere . A poignant and enchanting evocation of a life, inspired by a beautifully written meditation on a unique city.What is it but a changeable construct that for most of the history of the term has been used to artificially separate humans on the basis of physical characteristics, but has also been used to separate us according to language, politics, religion, nationality and culture.

Then, in the second half, she suddenly swings back around to an acceptably intelligent political-cultural-historical assessment, tells some interesting anecdotes about some interesting people and their lives in Trieste, and the book seemed to get deeper into Trieste as a place in these sections.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. All around me first-class passengers, awaiting the time to board their ship, are enjoying their last half-hour on Austrian solid before sailing away to America, Alexandria or the east… There are splashes of colour everywhere – braids and gilded epaulets, bright silks of summer, gaudy parasols and pink fringed reticules. She started as a reporter and was the only journalist to accompany the first successful expedition to Mount Everest in 1953. The city is somewhere I came very close to visiting on a long overland trek from Beijing to Basel via 14 countries back in 2008. Indo-Europeans known as Illyrians founded the city, then the Romans took it, the city-state of Venice colonized it, the Habsburgs occupied it, and finally the modern state of Italy got it after World War I.