Hotel Roma, Trieste, 1st March 2003
Early morning at the Serbian Orthodox church of St Spiridione: the Eastern rite rhetoric of colour and gold, of sad-faced icons and star painted window recesses, of a host of candles and sonorous tenor chanting, of a swinging censor throwing smoke up into a blue grey haze.
From richness to the austere simplicity of the Molo Audace, a stern finger of stone pointing to the horizon and the worldwide origins of Trieste’s 19th Century aspirations and wealth. At the seaward end a windrose indicates the directions of four winds, the Greco, Scirocco, Libeccio and Maestro – on the edge, between the Greco and the Scirocco, a fat-cheeked cherub boldly blows in the Bora. There is no hint of that today, the sea a flat oily calm, broken occasionally by a sculler pulling a needle boat that creates a transient disturbance like a fleeting worry on a contented mind. Well-wrapped figures in earnest conversation promenade up and down and pause by the rose looking down the coast to where sad Miramare is lost in the haze. Molo and Miramare, monuments to a hubristic imperial past.