Damn You, Trieste!

by George Henry

Trieste! You took only three days to seduce me and ruin my life. I used to be at peace with the world, relaxing in my retirement on Vancouver Island, Canada, vacationing with Janet all over the world to use up our hard-earned money so we didn’t leave any to our kids—until we visited Trieste. 

In 2010, we flew from Vancouver to Budapest to spend a month on rail and bus rides from Budapest to Bratislava, Vienna, Zagreb, Trieste, Zadar, Hvar, Split, Dubrovnik, Mostar, Sarajevo, and Belgrade.

I’d visited Italy several times, as far back as 1966 when I rode my Lambretta 125 scooter from England to see the glories of Venice. And although I loved Italian culture, I wasn’t particularly interested in visiting Trieste, a city that was out of our way. Janet persuaded me to go. She loved Italy in particular and couldn’t miss the famous James Joyce watering hole where he’d written The Dubliners and began Ulysses a hundred years previously.

We arrived in a cold but sunny Trieste, bleary-eyed after dozing on an early October morning bus ride from Zagreb, expecting to find an aging city that had lost any real significance—it wasn’t even listed in several of the guidebooks I’d consulted.

Janet had picked a great location for our bed and breakfast, the Gatto Rosso, not far from the harbor. I was surprised to discover we’d arrived during the annual Barcolana Regatta and Sailing Festival, the largest regatta in the world! The festival filled the city with music and concerts; crowds thronged the inner harbor; yachts raced day and night. What timing!

Janet, a former English literature instructor, had written seven romance novels at that time and I had considered attempting a novel myself. But nothing had pushed the right buttons for me to pick up the pen and plunge into the dark world of writing that has driven many authors—including Janet—to the edge of sanity. Trieste changed that.

Although we spent only three days exploring “the least Italian part of Italy,” Trieste proved to be a vibrant city at the geographical gateway between western and eastern Europe molded by the clashes of empires for centuries into one with varied architectures, a local language, and an Italian-Slovene culture. It was nothing like I’d imagined.

Forget about New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin—the usual suspects—here was a different kind of city with everything I could use as an exotic setting for a noir thriller. I immediately began making notes. I decided my protagonist, Milo, a former Canadian Intelligence agent—with Italian roots in Trieste—would live in an apartment above the Gatto Rosso, where he had an antagonistic relationship with a big orange cat.

His femme fatale would be Adara, the daughter of a mobster with a mansion next to the Miramare Castle. Milo lived close to cathedrals, the Grand Canal, sites where James Joyce had worked, drank, or skipped the rent, and the Lanterna lighthouse at the harbor. He’d jog up to the San Giusto Castello for views of the city; he rode his FZR 600 motorbike around the maze of streets and out to Miramare. Milo would appreciate only the best coffee and wine and frequent the Joyce Café, a location I invented on the enormous Piazza Unità d’Italia that fronted the Adriatic. He’d enjoy the variety of Italian, Slovenian and Croatian restaurants as we had.

When we continued south from Trieste, my pen kept jotting story ideas as we experienced the Dalmatian coast, Mostar, Sarajevo, and Belgrade. I used locations on the island of Hvar and in Split and Mostar to expand the story of Milo and Adara’s rollercoaster relationship in the criminal underworld of Trieste to produce my first novel, Blood Rain in Trieste, in 2015.

No one told me how hard it would be to become an author. It’s not just creating and writing a story; it’s the formatting, proofing, editing, publishing, and promotion that independent authors struggle through as their minds turn to mush and make them wish they’d taken up knitting instead—Janet had.

“There is probably no hell for authors in the next world—they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.” – C.N. Bovee.

But I’m still writing, not knitting. Yes, damn you, Trieste!