ROSIE-ON-THE-ROAD by Rosie Goldsmith: Trieste, July 2025. Part 1: Trieste’s New Literature Museum
I’ve longed to visit Trieste for many years and finally made it this July. Inspired by friends and writers who have long extolled the exceptional geography and culture of this easternmost Italian port city; inspired too by its famous visitors, James Joyce and Jan Morris, also by writer-friend Diego Marani who now lives part of the year in Trieste, and by the fact that Trieste has just opened a Literature Museum, I knew the time had come. I can happily confirm that Trieste is a remarkable city, a beautiful city, and I’m head over heels in love with its broad waterfront and harbour, its Grand Canal, its multilingual buzz, its many bookshops, multifaith churches and spacious Hapsburg buildings, its friendly cafés, gelaterias and restaurants with delicious seafood and wine (from Istria, Friuli, Prosecco). Trieste also has enough ‘history’ and literature to keep me busy for a lifetime. You may have seen my Trieste photographs and Facebook posts this July, but here and now, exclusively for the European Literature Network, I’ve written two Rosie-on-the-Road reports from Trieste: the first, an overview of its literary history through my visit to the Literature Museum, and second, an interview with Diego Marani, whose book The Celestial City (published in 2024 by Dedalus in a translation by Graham Anderson) was the launchpad for my literary journey to Trieste. My Trieste journey would not have been possible without Diego’s generous knowledge and companionship.
Trieste is a writers’ city, more than any other Italian city I know. It’s new literature museum, Letteratura Trieste (LET’S for short) opened in 2024 just a short distance away from the famous Piazza Unità, Italy’s largest seafront piazza. To have a museum dedicated to the literary history of a city is astonishing in itself but to have such a centrally-located, modern and engrossing museum is an additional gift. Its dominant background display colour is red (which obviously appealed to me immediately) and its plaques and displays are in several languages, well-suited to this multilingual city. Hundreds of books about Trieste, written by local writers and visitors are displayed for you to pick up and read. You can hear readings of James Joyce in one of the Irish-green rooms dedicated to his time here. You can watch films based on novels set in Trieste. You can follow the extensive literary itinerary of Trieste devised by the museum, which I followed over two days with Diego Marani, recorded on our Facebook feed.
The great river of Central European literature leads to Trieste
Claudio Magris, the chronicler of central Europe, was born in Trieste in 1939. He still lives here, very elderly and frail. This wall quotation leads me into the museum towards panels of historical background, essential to understanding this city’s unique literature.
(NB. As the museum doesn’t yet boast a printed catalogue, what follows are my notes and transcripts taken from the display boards.)
At the start of the 18th century, Trieste was a small fishing village on the southern edge of the Holy Roman Empire, governed by the Austrian house of Habsburg, to which the city had been linked since the act of dedication in 1382, enabling Trieste to be independent from its natural enemy, Venice. In 1719 Emperor Charles VI established a free port in Trieste, without duties or taxes. In the following two centuries the city’s demographic and economic development was dizzying, with native Italian, German and Slovenian communities being joined by Greek, Serbian, Albanian, Turkish and Armenian merchants and workers. Trieste became an open, modern, cosmopolitan city.
The cosmopolitan city spoke many languages.
There were three the main languages. Italian acted as a glue through the local dialect, Triestino, Trieste’s true lingua franca, with Slovenian spoken on the Karst plateau and in some working-class neighbourhoods, while German was the official language of bureaucracy and authority. With Vienna as its capital, in this supranational Empire people coexisted with often conflicting national identities. As a result of the Risorgimento, a significant portion of Trieste’s Italians aspired to link their destiny to that of the Kingdom of Italy, while Slovenians were developing a national identity of their own, aiming for greater recognition and autonomy. The Austrians were aware that without the port its Empire could not survive.
In July 1914 the coffins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria Hungary and his wife Sophie, killed in Sarajevo, arrived in Trieste. It marked the beginning of the First World War. 50,000 Triestinis, mostly Italian-speaking, were sent to Galicia, on the Russian front. When Rome entered the war against Vienna, many irredentists crossed the border to join the Italian army. At the end of the war, on 3d November 1918, the destroyer Audace docked in Trieste and the city became part of the Italian state. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was over.
Once the imperial administrative structure was dismantled and the Austrian employees repatriated, the city officially became Italian with the Treaty of Rapallo of 12th November 1920, and the new state committed itself to reviving the declining port with greater industrial development. At the same time, the city experienced the advent of Fascism, which inaugurated a policy of violence against Trieste’s Slovenian-speaking minority. In 1938, from a stage near the Town Hall in Piazza Unità d’Italia (formerly Piazza Grande), Benito Mussolini announced the racial laws intended to discriminate against the Jewish population.
In 1940, Italy entered the war alongside Germany and occupied a large part of Yugoslavia. At the fall of Mussolini in 1943, the Germans created the Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone (OZAK), effectively placing Trieste under the authority of the Third Reich and leading to the creation of Trieste’s notorious Nazi concentration camp, the Risiera of San Sabba (originally a rice-husking factory). Here up to 5000 Jews were gassed or held in readiness for Auschwitz. As so many of Trieste’s writers and intellectuals in that period were Jewish (a city that had for so long been upheld as a liberal Jewish city), the Riseria has become an important monument to remembrance. The Jewish writer and ant-fascist activist Giani Stuparich was imprisoned here, and famously escaped. In 1944 heavy bomber raids by Allied forces destroyed a large part of Trieste’s industrial area, and with it Italo Svevo’s villa. In May 1945, as the war drew to a close Tito’s Yugoslav troops entered the city and occupied it for forty days, carrying out harsh repression against all those who opposed the annexation of Trieste to Yugoslavia. In June 1945 the British and Americans established the Allied Military Government (AMG), followed by the establishment of the Free Territory of Trieste (FTT) in 1947. Trieste continued to be contested for decades.
On 5th October 1954, in London, a memorandum of understanding was signed between Italy and Yugoslavia: Trieste returned to Italian control, and a large part of the Istrian peninsula became part of Yugoslavia (today Croatia). Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the violent dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation, was Trieste ‘free’ to rediscover its unique geopolitical and economic role and the city’s centrality within Europe. Thanks to the Schengen Treaty with Slovenia in 2004 and Croatia in 2022, Trieste’s physical and political borders collapsed, and free movement with the rest of Europe became possible.
DOES TRIESTE LITERATURE EXIST?
To help answer this question, I sat down to interview the author Diego Marani, who has made Trieste his literary home. You can read his thoughts here in Part 2 of Rosie-on-the-Road in Trieste)
This question was first posed in a 1930 newspaper article about the Trieste writer Giani Stuparich, by the critic Pietro Pancrazi, who outlined some of the perceived traits of writers from Trieste, such as: problematism, psychological interest, moral anxiety, and expressive labour. Discussed endlessly, the question is still mixed up with the perpetual question of what constitutes Trieste’s identity and where it fits in with the rest of Italy. The critic Bruno Maier added to Pancrazi’s description by assigning to Triestino writers a sense of concreteness, realism, and seriousness and above all anti-literariness. What do you think?
ONE CITY, ONE LANGUAGE?
Today the nature of Trieste’s distinctive literature is focused largely on the existence and contentions posed by its multilingualism. It’s as though Slovenian writers from Trieste didn’t exist, wrote Miran Kosuta in 1992 in an article on translation. And in spite of Trieste’s literary links with the great Central European and German and Austrian traditions, which meant that Trieste was reading and discussing Nietzsche, Hebbel, Weininger, Strindberg, Kafka and Freud way ahead of the rest of Italy, Trieste’s own German-speaking literature attracted little attention from critics and translators, until recently.
TRIESTE AND TRANSLATION
Today Trieste can proudly call itself a city of literature and translation, and in a multilingual city this makes complete sense. I’d be curious to know if any of my translation colleagues have translated works from or about Trieste. The famous Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori (Higher School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators) of the University of Trieste is a proud example of Trieste’s status as a city of language and translation. (This where Diego Marani studied in the late 1970s, as you’ll be able to read in Trieste: Part 2.) Here the literatures and languages of Arabic, French, English, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian-Croatian, Slovenian, Spanish and German are taught. Several famous translators and polyglots are today associated with Trieste: Mario Praz was an essayist, critic, writer, translator and journalist, with interests in Italian, French, Spanish, German and Russian literature and translation; Francesco Saba Sardi, the great traveller, originally from Trieste relocated to Milan, translating from seven different languages.
Among the most curious creatures that inhabit the borders are the translators, those who join the cause of free men, wrote Ervino Pocar, from Piran (close to Trieste), who translated some of the greatest German language masterpieces into Italian, including Kugy and Kafka. Supporting him in the spread of Kafka’s work, was the writer, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and Germanist Alberto Spaini, to whom we owe Italian versions of works by Goethe, Hoffmann, Thomas Mann and Leo Perutz.
However, Trieste’s often contested multilingualism and political status have also led to scandalous cases of literary neglect. Several major Triestino writers were not translated or recognised for decades. Take the case of the major Slovene-language writer Boris Pahor, born in Trieste in 1913, died here in 1922, aged 108. His descriptions of the hardships of the Slovenian minority under fascism and of his own time in a Nazi concentration camp, feature in his most famous novel Necropolis, written in Slovenian and published in 1967. It was widely translated across the world, but not in Italy, his own country, until 2008.
TRIESTE’S ‘GREATS’: ITALO SVEVO, UMBERTO SABA AND JEWISH TRIESTE
Italo Svevo (1861-1928), born Ettore Schmitz, the author of Zeno’s Conscience, studied English with James Joyce, the Irish writer who lived for nearly 15 years in Trieste. Svevo’s background reflected the cosmopolitan, shifting identity typical of Trieste. He was born into a Jewish family in 1861 and worked most of his life as a clerk. His mother was Italian and his father a German Jew, and Svevo himself converted to Catholicism. His writings reflect a deep interest in emerging fields of psychoanalysis and self-examination.
Umberto Saba (1883-1957), was an Italian poet and novelist noted for his simple, lyrical autobiographical poems. Saba was raised by his Jewish mother in the ghetto of Trieste after his Christian father deserted them. Later, the racial laws, WW2, and the Nazi occupation of Trieste forced him to leave the bookshop he had opened in Trieste (today a famous museum and antiquarian bookshop); he was sheltered first in Paris, then in Rome, Florence and Milan. After the war he returned to Trieste and to rightful fame and awards (and reunited with his bookshop).
TRIESTE’S WOMEN WRITERS
We know too little about these women; even in Italy they are little known. Time for some enterprising research and investigation? Anyone interested? Their lives, what little I could glean, reflect the complex history of Trieste.
Ida Finzi alias Haydée (1867-1946) was a prolific and controversial Trieste writer and pioneer of female irredentist journalism in the city. She extolled the role women and mothers and wrote several books for children. Her Trieste-born friend Fortunata Petronio Morpurgo (who used the pen-name Willy Dias, 1872-1956), was a very active journalist, as well as churning out bestsellers that brought her fame and fortune. Pia Rimini (1900-1945), was a complex author, preoccupied with understanding the female psyche, and a member of the literary circles of Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba. Her 1929 collection of short stories La spalla alata (The Winged Shoulder) brought her success and recognition. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where she died.
Marica Nadlisek (1867-1940), mother of the writer Vladimir Bartol, was a teacher and champion of Slovenian language and women. She was also a writer and editor of Slovenka, Trieste’s first women’s newspaper (1897-1902).
Anita Pittoni (1901-1982) was a poet, artist, textile designer, author, founder and director of the Lo Zibaldone publishing house and literary archive, tenacious in pursuing, preserving and disseminating the cultural identity of Italian Trieste. I think I would have liked her very much.
There’s more about Trieste, its literature and literary walking tours on the LET’S museum website, all easily accessible, also in English:
https://www.triestemetro.eu/itinerari/itinerario/7/literature
https://www.triestemetro.eu/upload/sfogliabili/7
The only way to cool down our over-heated minds after our trip to the Trieste’s Museum of Literature is to eat ice cream. This is not fanciful or stereotypical Italian tourist nonsense on my part but a true Triestino tradition. When my literary companion Diego Marani bought his flat in Trieste, he was granted an official ‘Ice cream Passport’ which grants him citizenship (and 60 scoops) to Trieste’s famous Gelateria Zampolli. In this borderless, multicultural city maybe that’s the only kind of passport any of us should need. Join me next for Part 2 of my Trieste journey, when I interview Diego about literature and life in his Trieste.
Rosie Goldsmith
Main image: Diego Marani and Rosie Goldsmith in Trieste
All photos by Rosie Goldsmith
Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.
Read previous posts in Rosie-on-the-Road series:
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