Words: Gary Singh
Photography: Ashley Caneva
On my first visit to Trieste a few years ago, I found myself wandering along the northern side of Grado, where sailboats rested in the marina and wild expanses of light streaked across the sky. Just down the street, I accidentally discovered the old house of poet Biagio Marin, the island’s most favorite son.
Marin passed away in 1985, but the old house still carried a certain sympathy with time. Out front, on a stone pillar flanking a silver iron gate nearly obscured by trees, I noticed a plaque with his name: “La Casa di Biagio Marin.”
It wasn’t the only plaque. A second one was dedicated to another artist, the composer Antonio Smareglia, who died in this same house in 1929.
By sheer serendipity, the very next afternoon, our group dined at Fiuri de Tapo, a restaurant named after Marin’s first book of poetry. On that day, June 8, 2018, while at the restaurant, we heard the news that Anthony Bourdain had passed away in France.
As a result, by the time we drove to Trieste proper, I was awash with ghostly vibes. I became obsessed with local literary history.
After that trip, I devoured everything I could find about Trieste, its poets, authors and various scribes. I reread the legendary Jan Morris book about the city. I searched out English translations of Biagio Marin and Scipio Slataper. I bought books by Claudio Magris, especially Microcosms, which featured an evocative chapter on the Grado Lagoon area.
In Trieste it was easy to conjure up ghosts of literary troublemakers that once roamed the streets—James Joyce, Svevo, Stendhal, Sir Richard Francis Burton or Casanova to name but a few—and then use their vibrations to harmonize the current day. I felt like these people were my ancestors, not my literal ancestors, but my creative ancestors.
Mostly, though, this was Trieste’s past, the former version of the city, so on my next trip, in September of 2022, I arranged a meeting with one of Trieste’s contemporary writers, Luigi Nacci, who met me and put up with my rambling questions.
Oddly enough, we met at the trendy Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza Unità, not at all his kind of place. But there we were, immediately causing trouble, as the staff demanded we order food or drinks, otherwise we couldn’t sit at the outdoor tables.
Meanwhile, several tents were being set up in Piazza Unità for the Trieste Next-Festival of Scientific Research. Trieste was a renowned destination for academic scientists, but none of whom ever seemed to interact with the city on any real level. They just attended conventions, walked around with lanyards and then left. To Nacci, they represented the simulated aspects of the city, like the fake mosaics on the ground underneath us and the fake lighting in the piazza. It was all just to recreate some version of past glory, he said.
The authentic Trieste, Nacci claimed, was the Karst, where a deeper, wilder experience could be found. The wilderness, where one could open his lungs, was his preferred territory. It wasn’t separate from Trieste, but an integral part, older than Rome or Austria.
“For the poets and the writers that live here, if they write about this city, we try to discover our spirit, now, and what remains of the old spirit, now,” said Nacci. “And for me, it’s only my opinion, you can find the spirit, not here in the city, but in the woods, in the forest, in the Karst. Like Slataper. Up there, you can find bears, wolves, bora—the strong wind. All these elements are so strong, so natural, so wild. And in letteratura, in literature, only Scipio Slataper wrote about the Karst in Italian.”
When I told him Slataper and Biagio Marin were actually translated into English these days, he was surprised that I knew their work. My crazy obsessions had apparently paid off.
We then talked about our favorite books on Trieste. Nacci said the Jan Morris book was the best one about the city, while the best book about the Karst, he said, was an obscure work by the American historian, James C. Davis, titled, Carso: riscatto dalla povertà. Whereas Morris first arrived as a British soldier assigned to Trieste following the Second World War, Davis was an American soldier at the same time. He married a woman from the Karst and then wrote a book exploring multiple generations of one rural family as it lived through changes brought about by centuries of gradual modernization. The book was originally published in English as Rise From Want: A Peasant Family in the Machine Age.
“The best books about Trieste, this city, this zone, this border, are by people not from Trieste,” Nacci said, with a laugh. “The UK and the United States. It’s very interesting.”
Nacci also turned me on to the work of Fulvio Tomizza, the legendary Istrian writer, especially his novel, Materada. The Istrian exodus resonated with me, due to my own family’s experience with the Partition of India.
Talking to Nacci was more useful than any tourist guidebook. The conversation felt like two literary denizens of the world’s ignored places comparing notes, although after about one hour, we both grew mutually bored of Caffe degli Specchi. At the end of our talk, Nacci gave me his last personal copy of his most recent book, Trieste selvatica, and then signed it.
The next morning, when I departed my hotel for the final time, I almost felt the ghost of Jan Morris accompanying me. Her book on Trieste had concluded in masterful fashion. Envisioning the city following her departure, she was hoping to haunt Trieste as happily as it had haunted her.
I wanted to do the same. Even though I would soon be on to the next destination, if Triestines looked around hard enough, they would sense my presence around town. They would find my spirit on the streets, in the cafes, talking with Nacci or maybe even just wandering along the harbor at Grado, enjoying its ghostly vibe.
