Mining the Diaries 100: Italy
Hotel Roma, Via Carlo Ghega, Trieste, 16th May 2023
A return to Trieste after twenty-one years. We landed at Ronchi dei Legionari mid-morning and, after a battle of wills with the ticket machine, boarded the bus for Trieste. It was a forty-five minute ride south-east to the city, with detours to towns and villages along the way to drop off and pick up passengers. The last leg from Sistiana followed the scenic coast along the Gulf of Trieste into the railway station.
It was a short walk to the Hotel Roma, which I realised was where I had stayed in 2003, though it was now much expanded and smarter – pure coincidence as D had made the booking. We were in spacious three-bed rooms in a block opposite, each had a kitchen space, like an apart-hotel.
We refreshed ourselves with pizza and beer at a fast food café fifty yards down the road, the first place we came to, cheap, cheerful and very local.
Fortified, we set off on an ambling tour, taking the Via Roma down to the Grand Canal (a misnomer once one has been to Venice), onto the quayside along the Riva Tre Novenbre, past the grand Piazza Unita d’Italia, making a loop around the streets to the south, then back across the Unita. The grandness and beauty of Trieste are enshrined in the imposing, not to say self-important, financial services company buildings built at the height of the Austro Hungarian fin de siècle prosperity. Four churches made impressions: the 17th century Church of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary, with a strange all-seeing eye motif above the door and a glazed niche filled with glittering votive offerings; the late 18th century Church of the Blessed Virgin of Help; the early-mid 19th century church of Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo, in neo-classical Ionic style overlooking the eponymous piazza; and the Byzantine styled Serbian Orthodox Temple of the Holy Trinity and St. Spyridon from 1869 (closed and a must visit for later).
It was not all grandeur. Rigatteria, in Via Malcanton, otherwise known as Laura and Claudio Di Pinto’s Junk Shop, was a jumbled Wundercammer of furniture, antiques, paintings, prints, books, curiosities and objects d’art. And there were the sell-all shops, usually Chinese-run. They caught our eyes with displays of curious and colourful of geegaws, then revealed themselves as bazaars for all needs. Want a watch, a radio, a scarf, a fishing reel? Come in. Maybe a bra, a bag, a harmonica, an abacus, a Barbie doll, a micrometer, a snow dome or a blood pressure monitor? Yes. Curious phenomena, they sat under the towering Empire facades of the late 19th century. Yet, they oddly echoed that time. Jan Morris in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere wrote: ‘At first it [Trieste] was essentially an emporium, a market-place where goods brought by land or sea were assembled for sale, and then sent off again – a kind of permanent trade fair, with transport facilities.’
Everywhere seemed very quiet, maybe it was the cold buffeting wind that kept people indoors. I wondered if it wsa the Bora; D suggested the Sirocco. We checked on the wind rose at the end of the Molo Audace, but it was ambiguous.
Dinner was goulash and potatoes and beer and at Buffet & Birreria Rudy, Trieste joining Bavaria in a successful marriage.
To bed with a feeling that, so far, I’m less taken with Trieste than last time – it seems like any busy medium size city with a mix of ordinary and fine building and a lot of traffic. Maybe it’s just the ambling with someone else – last time I came by alone with more focus and a list of things to do after reading Jan Morris and had only myself to please. The weather was better – everything looked finer in the sun. And twenty years have taken their toll on both Trieste and me.