ROSIE-ON-THE-ROAD by Rosie Goldsmith: Trieste, July 2025. Part 2: Interview with Diego Marani

RG: After many years of wanting to visit the city, I’ve finally made it to Trieste. I’m here to explore its literary history with Diego Marani, author, linguist, interpreter, translator and diplomat, who I first met in London at the British Library over a decade ago when he represented Italy at our annual European Literature Night. We’ve kept in touch since then, and Diego wrote on contemporary Italian literature for #TheItalianRiveter magazine in 2022, which you can still read for free on our website.

He was born near Ferrara in 1959, worked in Brussels for over 40 years and today lives part of the year in Trieste.

Diego, tell me, why Trieste? 

DM: This is not my city, not originally my part of Italy, but when I was young I wanted to come here to study because Trieste university had a famous faculty of translation and interpretation, which became my profession eventually with the European Commission in Brussels. 

When I arrived in Trieste as a student in the late 1970s, I was full of the ideology of the Italian nation state: Trieste for Italians was a sacred place of ‘Italianity’, of the Italian spirit and nation, a place that we had conquered as our own after years of struggle. That is what we were taught at school. 

The city flourished under the Habsburgs in the 18th century, when it became a free port. After the Austrian Empire fell at the end of WW1, not only Trieste, but the whole region around it, became what we called “terre irredente” (unredeemed lands) lands that Italians had to conquer back or ‘save’, from the foreign presence. So, I had arrived here with this notion and the official story of Trieste – but I discovered a completely different place: Trieste is not only Italian but also Slovenian, and more. It was in the past a melting pot and this aura still exists today. Its people are Triestini, people from Trieste, speaking their own dialect and having a specific identity. I also discovered a whole bundle of overlapping and intersecting borders with other countries, one over the other. In the 1970’s Europe was dominated by political borders and divides, Trieste lay exactly on one of the hardest political borders, the iron curtain with the communist East, with Yugoslavia – in a way like Berlin. The allied occupation after WW2 ended in Trieste only in 1954, and before that Trieste was like Berlin, occupied by the Allies and awaiting a peace treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia. And in addition to the political border, there was a linguistic and geographical border, because this narrow strip of land, where Trieste is located, is at the very end of Italy, at the end of the wide northern plains of Italy, where the Karst mountains begin and meet Istria and the eastern Alps. The Karst are like the Highlands, white limestone rocks: a harsh landscape surrounding Trieste. For me, coming from Emilia Romagna in inland Italy, where everything was flat for kilometres and kilometres, where the language was always the same, except for local, unwritten dialects, this place was a real surprise. Take the language here – there are many spoken – Italian, Slovenian, German, Greek, Serbian – but there is also a lingua franca because everyone speaks Triestino. It is a language or dialect of the coast and harbour towns. There are poets writing in Triestino; it’s even spoken at university by teachers and students. A professor or shopkeeper might suddenly switch from standard Italian to Triestino because it’s a fully-fledged language in which you can say anything. It is not a limited rural dialect, like dialects elsewhere in Italy. 

To remind people, Diego: you are a linguist, speak several languages, you’ve written 22 books in Italian which have been translated into other languages, and you even invented a language, Europanto, in which you wrote articles and short stories. So it’s all this that attracted you to Trieste?

I realised living here that this is a faultline between the Latin Roman world and the Slavic world. I’m intrigued by borders and the mixture of everything that happens round borders. Trieste was the main harbour of an empire for a long time, the Habsburg Empire. German was the common language, and the language of bureaucracy, but people came from all over the empire to live and work and spoke their own languages. It was a cosmopolitan city, like many cities in medieval and Renaissance Europe. A century ago, here, everybody would speak the language one needed depending on the situation. So you might speak Slovenian in the villages, and Italian downtown; German in the town hall, and Triestino with your family and friends. 

But all this disappeared later with the disintegration of empires and the birth of nation states, which homogenised everything. Later, everything should belong to one unified nation, one language, one territory, one flag, one identity, all artificial, but nonetheless, this was the pattern. And this pattern killed cosmopolitanism, killed the mixture and diversity of cities like Istanbul, Marseille, Venice, and Trieste in particular. So what I like here is this taste of international culture that still survives; its mixture of cultures, which had begun to fade under post-war Italian nationalism but has returned thanks to the European Union and the end of the Cold War. Trieste is now an open border. 

But Trieste is still Italy?

Italy is made up of many Italies, many different kinds of cities, people, cultures, all in one way or another Italian in essence, but different. I discovered that the national ideology and mythology that I was taught at school was completely false. Here in Trieste we have a large Slovenian minority, living here before Italy existed as a nation state, but we were never taught that at school. Trieste did not become part of Italy until 1918!  And these people, the Slovenians, were living here for centuries, one of the many Slavic tribes that migrated West. They are all bilingual, they speak both languages, and they see themselves as a mixture of Italian and Slovenian, certainly not Yugoslavians, but neither fully Slovenians. This is the charm, the fascination of the place for me, an area of diversity, of cultures and stories, my idea of Europe, many people and ideas together, all on the same team.

One thing that you and I have in common is our work promoting European culture. You worked for the European Commission in Brussels for many years. Why do you think Trieste is a good European city? 

Trieste is a symbol of what Europe could be, also for Italians. Italy is not just one Italy but composed of different cities, ancient states, different cultures, different dialects. Even if we all speak our national language, Italian, you cannot be Italian without your dialect. Local dialects have a strength and value. You don’t go to the local pub and speak Italian, nowhere in Italy. You need to speak dialect. This is normal. It is a matter of courtesy, of respect for your local culture. And this is the way Europe should be, a constellation of different cultures and peoples and languages that have, as a common base, the fact of being European. People sometimes say that European culture doesn’t exist, but it is actually the essence of all our nations and states. Once – just a century ago – Europe used to share this culture, a common humanistic culture, the classic culture. Now we have abandoned this. We don’t learn Latin and ancient Greek anymore, we don’t study the classical authors who shaped our literatures and cultures. We think that is old stuff and useless for modern life, but that was our soul. Here in Trieste, I find the remains of all this Europeanness, and I hope that this small fire will keep on burning and perhaps soon become a big fire and enlighten the rest of Europe with this spirit, which is the true European spirit. 

In The Italian Riveter magazine in 2022, we published an extract of your book, La Citta Celeste about Trieste, translated last year into English as The Celestial City by Graham Anderson for Dedalus. Why did you write a book about Trieste? 

At the beginning I was intimidated by Trieste, by all those great writers before me. How could I dare to write about Trieste? I was nobody compared to them. But living here, studying here, coming back here, I have been gathering ideas about this place for decades. My Trieste book was a slow burn and went through a necessary maturation, but in the end I felt I had to tell my story of this city and of my relationship with it. It’s the story of my personal growth, of my changing perceptions of this place from when I was 20 to 60 and the different ways you see things in different moments of your life. And I also needed to come face to face with my favourite Trieste’s writers, to have a dialogue with them, because they have influenced me deeply in my life and work. I needed to talk to them, to have an exchange with them, and writing was the only way. 

When I first came here as a student it was a way to come to terms with my youth and my birthplace and in a way also with my parents. My parents had instilled in me a passion for travel and discovery and I wanted to put all this into practice. So I abandoned my family and my city of Ferrara to come here. It was a deliberate divorce, at the same time an act of rebellion. Trieste is only three hours from Ferrara but in the ‘70s and ‘80s no one came here to study or even go on holiday. Trieste was a faraway place, at the very end of Italy. My region of Emilia Romagna was at that time the economic, business, political and intellectual hub of Italy. Bologna was the intellectual capital of Italy and its university was a laboratory of modernity. Umberto Eco was teaching at Bologna University – why didn’t I go there instead of Trieste? That would have made more sense. Coming to Trieste was absolutely unique, I was going against the grain, I was contesting the dominant cultural discourse of Italy at the time. Today Italian students go everywhere, but then Trieste was the end of the world. So I also needed to try to explain my choice to myself and later to my readers: why abandon something that made sense? The Celestial City serves as my personal clarification, to myself and my world. Now you can read it in English too!

So here you are in Trieste, you’ve made your peace with your past. What has Trieste given you? What does it give you today?

Always a different perspective. When you stay in just one place, you see things as you and everyone else always have done. When you go to a new place, a place that is not yours, you are obliged to see things differently, and sometimes you end up wanting to explain that place to others and to those who live there – which is what I have done with Trieste. This is not arrogance; it is an exchange and it helps us see the familiar differently. This exchange with Trieste is for me very rich. I’ve also realised that I like not to belong, to be a foreigner. I don’t live here. I will always leave. I’m not even a tourist, I come here in a sort of eternal escape from what I already know. This feeling of being a foreigner is to me liberation. It makes me feel that I have many different lives at my disposal and no ties. Of course I have responsibilities and obligations and a house and family and all that but I am also a nomad, a foreigner, and I cultivate this nomadic spirit in my mind. Being a foreigner is like being the village idiot: you can say and do whatever you want.

This is what the travel writer Jan Morris felt, and wrote about in her book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere?

Yes. Someone not from here who might live tomorrow somewhere else. It’s the illusion of eternal freedom, above all freedom from national loyalties. Or nationalism. I want to belong to what I like, to what nourishes me in terms of culture and language and ideals, and I find this in Trieste. 

Let’s talk about Trieste as a writer’s city. What makes Trieste a writer’s city – in the past and today?

It has a lively, contemporary writing scene. I’ve read the writers of the past, everyone I can on Trieste, and I know several writers living here today. What I like is that in Trieste the written word is still sacred. People read much more than in the rest of Italy, and I think this is a heritage from the Habsburg Times. when Trieste was annexed to Italy the people here were more literate than in the rest of the country. This passion for the written word goes on. Trieste belongs to the Central European cultural world and to its rich literary tradition. That world is still here. Prague and Ljubljana and Vienna and Budapest and Zagreb are not far away. This is the spirit you have here, a city that look towards the sea, a people of seafarers and travellers, used to meet different cultures, with an open mind to change and discovery.  There are also so many bookstores and antiquarian bookstores in Trieste. One of my best friends is an antiquarian bookseller and also a publisher. His bookstore Libreria Antiquaria Drogheria 28 is worth a visit. Simone Volpato will show you around and will tell you stories about the ties between Trieste and literature. Simone publishes local stories, discovers traces of lost literary correspondences, recomposes them, connects them and thus creates new stories of the city and its books. I mean, the city of Ferrara on the contrary, despite its very noble cultural tradition, has only got two bookstores, very ordinary and commercial. Publishing instead is thriving in Trieste. The book is alive.

(Instead of listing all the writers I value in Trieste now in our conversation I’ll create a separate Trieste reading list for you)*

Let’s talk about the classic writers who came from or visited Trieste.

They are very special people, like Joyce and Svevo and Saba. Umberto Saba, my favourite poet in the whole of Italian literature, is from Trieste. He wrote mainly between the first and second wars. In the same period in the rest of Italy, you had modernist poets, futurists, but Saba is a classicist. When he was a child, his mother would send him to poetry lessons. Now usually you send your child to piano or painting lessons: Who would send their child to poetry lessons? This is Trieste!

James Joyce came here in 1904 aged 22, with Nora, to teach English; they had two children here. This city was then very cosmopolitan, an imperial city. When Trieste became Italian in 1918, all this cosmopolitanism began disappearing and Trieste was becoming an ordinary Italian city. I am convinced that Joyce loved Trieste because of its cosmopolitanism, its language and variety and because of its European nature. He also used the Triestino dialect in some of his writings. He was impressed by the inventiveness and originality of the language. Trieste was a direct influence on Ulysses, the Dubliners and much more. 

When he lived here, Joyce became friends with another writer, Italo Svevo, whose path to fame was very curious. Svevo’s true name was Ettore Schmidt. He was a German-speaking Jew living in Trieste but educated in Germany. He wanted to be a writer, but not to write in German, the language in which he was educated. He wanted to write in Italian, the language of the family, because he felt Italian. And so he wrote in a kind of rough and rudimentary Italian, and when you read Svevo you feel it’s written by someone who has just learned the language. His success came when he was published in France, in translation, with Joyce’s help. It was the French who discovered the real Svevo. Italians considered him a writer of lesser value, because of his bad knowledge of literary Italian. Svevo was important in another way too: he introduced Italians to the ideas of psychoanalysis. In 1923, his seminal novel Zeno’s Conscience, based on psychoanalysis, was published, a major novel for Italian literature. Because Svevo read German, he had read Freud. The rest of Europe was fainting on Freud’s sofas but in Italy then nobody knew anything about Freud. With his novels Svevo opened Italy’s door to Trieste, and to the very different culture of Trieste. 

There are wonderful writers’ statues round the city. There’s a lovely statue of James Joyce and plaques to him; hotels and streets named after him, and Joycian quotes on shop windows and ice cream parlours. How great an influence did Trieste have on Joyce and vice versa?

Joyce lived here – with some breaks – from 1904-1920. He worked teaching English as well as writing some of his most famous works here, including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the first three chapters of Ulysses. Today Joyce is a kind of tourist attraction. In Trieste we celebrate Bloomsday in June. There are three days of Bloomsday celebrations and tours round the city. People come from other places in Italy to join in. It is very lively. I’m not sure that all these people read Ulysses and I’ve only read up to page 115. There you go. It’s difficult to read Ulysses but it doesn’t mean it’s not wonderful. You have to understand the spirit of this book and its ideas and what it tells you about the novel form. In fact, Joyce, with his work that undermined the traditional structure of the novel, wanted to tell us that the novel is dead. Instead, the novel is still here, and in this city more than ever. But his conceptual revolution was important in reviving the novel. I think what Joyce learned here in Trieste was diversity. He probably thought he was coming to an Italian city, but when he arrived in 1904 he discovered that it had never been just an Italian city. In Trieste then Italian was the language of the bourgeoisie, of the ship owners, of the merchants and traders, but all the workers here were Slavic: Croatians or Slovenians. I think that this mixture was attractive for Joyce and the kind of people he met here, like Italo Svevo himself, who was a very unusual intellectual and literary man, someone you would certainly not encounter in other Italian cities. 

What else makes Trieste a city of writers? It’s not just tourist branding. When you walk around the city, do you feel this is a good place for writers? There’s a museum, a literature museum. What else? 

My explanation is that this city is full of stories because of its variety of cultures and languages. People here have stories to tell and writing is one way to know yourself and to clarify all these different identities. There is this passion for the written word for this reason, to tell the stories this city has to tell. There is a harbour, people come and go, there are bookshops and statues not of politicians or national heroes but of writers. It’s also a city full of readers whereas across the whole country book sales are not good and reading is going down. In Trieste people read newspapers too, not just online or on their mobile phones. Our Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo is a miracle because it is one of the few Italian local newspapers that thrives in print. There’s also a new Literature Museum, it’s world class.

What about Triestino literature, compared with the rest of Italy? Do you rank Trieste’s literature here as high as the rest? 

It is not the mainstream. It never has been. The important Italian writers are mainly in other cities but here in Trieste what they still have is their unique book culture, tradition and originality. It is alive. As a writer, I travel all over Italy with my books, and when I go to the different parts of Italy, the literary scene seems very industrial. It’s a literature industry. You have big publishing groups in Milan and Rome with their own writers and large-scale promotion of the book, celebrities and fashionable topics. I don’t like to follow fashion as a writer. In Trieste on the contrary you can be a spontaneous writer who writes what he likes, original, different, and indifferent to fashion. 

Would you say that an Italian writer like Elena Ferrante, who is not just famous in Naples, but all over Italy, and the rest of the world, is a rare event?

It is a rare event, but in my opinion, Ferrante represents a recent trend of Italian writers, who write about the South and the politics and poverty and suffering of women and desperate families in the South, and this has become fashionable. It is meaningful, it’s important, Ferrante is well-written, but for me it is a cliché. Italy is not only like that. Italy is also modern Milan, the most buoyant city in the north; it is also Rome with its modern contradictions, and all the other cities and regions and villages living the contradictions of modern times, immigration and social change. Sadly the clichés of Italy never die away. 

Thank you for the interview Diego and for taking me round Trieste and showing me the literary sights!

Main image: Diego Marani

All photos by Rosie Goldsmith

*DIEGO MARANI’S TRIESTE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

As well as James Joyce (The Letters), Italo Svevo (Senilità and La Coscienza Di Zeno) and Umberto Saba (Il Canzoniere) I’d like to recommend:
Virgilio Giotti, who writes in dialect. 

Biagio Marin, a poet from the nearby city of Grado, on the lagoon.
Marin actually writes in the dialect from Grado. 

Then you have modern Triestino writers like Claudio Magris. He is a celebrity, one of Italy’s most important writers. In his books he describes how much Trieste belongs to Central European culture and its specific and special role in European culture. 

Pino Roveredo was a fantastic writer, with a very unusual style and topics. He wrote about mental illness and Trieste’s important link with this. It is in Trieste that in the 1970’s the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia made a revolutionary experiment. Mental hospitals then where like prisons but he allowed patients to leave the hospitals by day, to pursue other treatments and where possible normal life. Basaglia, with his experiments, led to the closure of asylums once and for all. His work transformed the approach to mental illness in Italy and beyond.

Bobi Bazlen: He never wrote a single line, but his inspiration was immense. He died in the ’60s. He was the director of Adelphi, one of the most important publishing houses in Italy. He would personally read and select the writers for publication and was the soul of Trieste’s cultural world for decades. A very useful book to understand his influence in Italian culture is Bobi Bazlen: l’ombra di Trieste by Cristina Battocletti.

Another unmissable writer is the Triestino-Slovenian Boris Pahor. His life was dramatic. A product of mixed cultural and ethnic backgrounds, he was persecuted by both the fascists and the nazis. He was a freedom fighter and deported to different prison camps in Germany, but he survived them all. His masterpiece is Nekropola.

Two more Trieste writers worth reading are Fulvio Tomizza and Pierantonio Quarantotti-Gambini. Tomizza is the voice of Istria and a witness to its tormented history. Quarantotti-Gambini is the voice of early 20^th century youth and light-heartedness. However, in Primavera a Trieste (Spring in Trieste), he tells the story of the occupation of the city by Tito and of his own daring escape from arrest and  execution as an Italian intellectual. 

Scipio Slataper (Italian) and Srecko Kosovel (Slovenian) are two more authors worth reading. They express both the spirit of this city and of its people from the Italian and from the Slovenian points of view. 

Juan Octavio Prenz was an Argentine writer, poet and literary critic, professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Trieste. He is the author of a dense poetic production that unfolds as a sort of ‘mysticism of wandering’. Prenz was a true Triestino by adoption. El señor Kreck (Mr. Kreck) is his best novel. In 2019 he was awarded the Nonino Prize for having reconciled the epic fantasy of Latin American literature with the themes and genres of Central European literature.

There are women writers too ofcourse! Trieste is not a male-dominated literary society. Anna Pittoni is just one example. A writer and artist from the 1920s. Also, Leonor Fini, a painter and designer; who influenced generations of artists across the borders. 

SOME ADDITIONAL TRIESTE WRITERS AND BOOKS FROM ROSIE GOLDSMITH

My favourite book about Trieste is by Jan Morris. I carried her Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, as well as The Italian Riveter, which has a whole section on Trieste, with me wherever I went. If you have any titles you’d like to add to our Trieste Reading List please get in touch. These are just a few from me to add to Diego’s list.

Giani Stuparich: Un Anno di Scuola 

Daniele del Guidice: Lo Stadio di Wimbledon

Laila Wadia: Per La Pelle 

Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies

Claudio Magris: Danube, Microcosmi, il Mito Asburgico

Mauro Covacich: Anomalie, Mal d’autobus

Jan Morris: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Michael Pearce: A Dead Man in Trieste 

John McCourt: The Years of Bloom

Katri Skala: A Perfect Mother

Roberto Covaz: Marco, The Penguin of Trieste

Paolo Rumiz: Canto per Europa, Verranno di Notte, Il Filo Infinito

Diego Marani: The Celestial City.