Talking Location With author Katri Skala – Trieste

15th September 2018

#TalkingLocationWith… Katri Skala, author of A Perfect Mother which is mainly set in the city.

Long before I visited Trieste I yearned for it. It’s one of those places that looms large in the imagination of writers: it’s connected with exile and liminality; with cosmopolitanism and murder. James Joyce lived there for over ten years and referred to the city as Europiccola, little Europe; Richard Burton translated Arabian Nights in an inn on the windy Karst plateau above the city; the distinguished 17th century German art historian Johann Winkelmann was mysteriously murdered in a hotel room; Italo Svevo, a native Triestine and friend of Joyce’s, wrote what is considered to be the first novel about psychoanalysis, Zeno’s Conscience. Jan Morris, the great British travel writer, captured its essence by describing it as ‘nation of nowhere’, a refuge for wandering spirits; melancholy, haunting and completely captivating.

Photo: Wikipedia Piazza Unità d’Italia

Long before seeing Trieste I pondered writing a story set there. Its complex genealogy stirred my imagination. Roman, then almost a thousand years of Hapsburg rule, then Italian; and surrounded on all sides by Slavs. To boot I have Viennese ancestry, and this made me wonder about the cultural influences on the city. I’d heard my father and his relatives talk often in passing about Trieste. I’d read Morris, Svevo, Magris.

My first visit took place in 2010, the year I started working on the novel. It was a very hot week in July. I stayed in the north-eastern part of the city at a grand 19th century residence called the Villa Bottacin. It was quiet, with a beautiful garden and swimming pool. Its history and architecture echoed the Trieste I wanted to discover, the period when Trieste was enlarged by the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa and became a vibrant bourgeois port-city.

The Villa Bottacin was also a good place from which to set off on foot in all directions to discover the many eclectic areas of the city, from the Imperial centre known as the Borgo Teresiano after Maria Theresa, to the ancient hill of San Giusto where the medieval cathedral stands.

Wikipedia – San Giusto

Trieste is known for its coffee-houses, redolent of the time when Vienna cast its long cultural arm around the port-city. My favourite was the Caffè San Marco on the Via Cesare Battisti. Established in the early 20th century it was a rendez-vous for writers, intellectuals and political activists. Today it remains an unpretentious atmospheric haven for locals.

In my subsequent visits over the next several years, I returned often to the San Marco; I also spent time in other cafes. The Tommaseo near the waterfront, reflects the salient aspects of the building splurge which characterised the Empress’s influence on the city’s architecture. It was also situated next door to one of Joyce’s favourite churches, the Greek-Orthodox S. Nicolo dei Greci. A few steps in either direction took me to two of the more commanding sites of the city: the Canal Grande, a waterway leading in from the sea to the Piazza San Antonio where another historic cafe, the Stella Polare, now exists as an ordinary pit-stop for Triestine lunchtime workers; and just to the south, the grand Piazza Dell’Unita d’Italia, the monumental central square, which opens onto an extravagant view of the Adriatic.

On subsequent visits I stayed in hotels in different parts of the city: the Hotel James Joyce in città vecchia, the old city, was a favourite, reasonable and felicitously named.  With each stay I wandered a new neighbourhood, searching out the important detail to bring the Trieste of my novel to life.

I was also curious about contemporary Trieste, taking ambles outside of the historic central areas and into the more industrial and residential outskirts where everyday living was tangible. The city had the murmurings of both a flowering hub for young people, as well as the less appealing noises of ethnic conflict. The San Giovanni park, home of the city’s massive former psychiatric hospital, offered a glimpse of how the past and the present were coming together in a dynamic cultural spot.

With every visit, I would pay my respects to James Joyce, a statue at street level on the Ponto Rosso by the Grand Canal; and make a visit to the Public Gardens where busts of the city’s great writers are commemorated. Early evening I joined Triestines on the terrace of the elegant Caffe Specchi for an aperitivo; and with them, if the weather allowed, I would marvel at the hazy outline of the fairytale Castle Miramare in the distance across the bay.

Thank you so much to Katri for her thoughts on Trieste. Katri is not on Social Media at this time.

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