Trieste

An old Italian woman seeks a reunion with her son, fathered by an SS officer and taken away by German authorities sixty-two years ago, while she remembers and discusses the atrocities committed in Northern Italy during World War II.

Gem of the Adriatic, Trieste sparkled and beckoned through the pages of poets and novelists. Drawn there in search of literary ghosts, of the poet Umberto Saba and the novelists Italo Svevo and James Joyce, Joseph Cary found instead a city with an imaginative life of its own, the one that rises, tantalizing from the pages of this book. The story of Cary's travels, A Ghost in Trieste, is also a tale of discovery and transformation, as the bustling world of port and airplane, baggage and trams and trains becomes the landscape of history and literature, language and art, psychoanalysis and the self. Here is the crossroads of East and West. A port held in turn by the Romans, the Venetians, the Austrians, the Germans, the Slavs, and finally the Italians, Trieste is the capital of nowhere, fertile source of a unique literary florescence before the First World War. At times an exile home and an exiled city. "I cannot claim to have walked across it all,:" wrote Saba, the poet of Trieste in 1910 of the city Cary crosses and recrosses, seeking the poetry of the place that inspired its literary giants. Trieste's cultural and historical riches, its geographical splendor of hills and sea and mysterious presence unfold in a series of stories, monologues and literary juxtapositions that reveal the city's charms as well as its seductive hold on the writer's imagination. Throughout, literary and immediate impressions alike are elaborated in paintings and maps, and in handsome line drawings by Nicholas Read. This "clownish and adolescent Parsifal," this Trieste of the "prickly grace," this place "impaled in my heart like a permanent point," this symbol of the Adriatic, this "city made of books" — here the book remakes the city. The Trieste of allusions magically becomes a city of palpable allure, of warmth and trying contradictions and gritty beauty. Part travel diary, part guide book, part literary history, A Ghost in Trieste is a brilliant introduction to an extraordinary time and place. In Joseph Cary, Trieste has found a new poet, and readers, a remarkably captivating companion and guide.

Uses the history of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav border to examine how representations of difference have affected the politics of sovereignty during the twentieth century.

Traces the changing identity and ownership of the important city of Trieste in a turbulent period. The port of Trieste, standing at a crucial strategic point at the head of the Adriatic, had a turbulent history in the mid-twentieth century. With the disappearance of the Habsburg empire after the First World War, it passed intoItalian hands. During the Second World War, the Nazis reclaimed the city as part of the Reich. In 1945, Trieste slipped through Tito's fingers and was internationalised under Allied military government control, returning to Italian sovereignty in 1954. This book examines Trieste's transformation from an imperial commercial centre at the crossroads of the Italian, German and Balkan worlds to an Italian border city on the southern fringe of the iron curtain. Concentrating on local sources, the book shows how Triestines, renowned for their cosmopolitan Central European affiliations, articulated an Italian civic identity after the First World War, and traces the fitful process ofaffirming Trieste's Italianness over the course of nearly four decades of liberal, Fascist and international rule. It suggests that Italianisation resulted from complicated interactions with Rome and interference by internationalpowers attempting to strengthen western Europe at the edge of the Balkans.

One hundred years ago, Trieste was the chief seaport of the entire Austro-Hungarian empire, but today many people have no idea where it is. This fascinating Italian city on the Adriatic, bordering the former Yugoslavia, has always tantalized Jan Morris with its moodiness and melancholy. She has chosen it as the subject of this, her final work, because it was the first city she knew as an adult -- initially as a young soldier at the end of World War II, and later as an elderly woman. This is not only her last book, but in many ways her most complex as well, for Trieste has come to represent her own life with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. Jan Morris evokes Trieste's modern history -- from the long period of wealth and stability under the Habsburgs, through the ambiguities of Fas-cism and the hardships of the Cold War. She has been going to Trieste for more than half a century and has come to see herself reflected in it: not just her interests and preoccupations -- cities, empires, ships and animals -- but her intimate convictions about such matters as patriotism, sex, civility and kindness. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is the culmination of a singular career.

When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste. Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.

This is the inside story of how Trieste found itself poised on a knife edge at the end of World War II. Situated near the boundaries of Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia, this pivotal port city was caught in May 1945 between advancing Allied, Russian, and Yugoslav armies on the strategically vital front lines of the nascent Cold War. Germany lay defeated, and now there were new enemies - Russia and Communism. Told through the stories of twelve men and women from seven different countries, Flashpoint Trieste chronicles, on a human scale, the beginning of the Cold War. A British colonel from the Special Operations Executive, a Maori officer from a New Zealand infantry battalion and a young Yugoslav partisan captain race for the city on May 1, 1945, with the Allies determined to beat Tito's forces and the Russians to the vital port. An American infantry general, decorated in combat in Italy, then holds the line as Trieste is divided between the American and British armies, and the Yugoslav Communist partisans of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. An American intelligence officer tracks wanted Nazis. An Italian woman Communist walks back to her native city from Auschwitz. An Austrian SS chief goes on the run to escape justice for the atrocities he committed in the city. Having survived the war, everyone is now desperate to make it through the liberation. American investigators hunt for priceless artifacts looted by the Germans. British intelligence will stop at nothing to hold the line against encroaching Communism, and Italian partisans hunt down fascist collaborators. Life is fast and violent, as former warring parties make common cause against the Russians. As the postwar world order unfolds, the borders of the new Europe are being hammered out.

If you plan to tour Europe, you should consider the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeastern Italy, bordering Austria and Slovenia. For simplicity's sake, we abbreviate the region's full name to Friuli. This lovely region may be an ideal vacation spot. You can get classic Italian food and other specialties and wash it down with excellent local wine. While Friuli is by no means undiscovered by tourists, you usually won't be fighting crowds to see what you want. Like most regions of Italy, it has belonged to many nations. The area remains multicultural, with an exceptional mixture of Italian, Austrian, and Slavic influences. Trieste, with a population of about two hundred thousand, is the region's largest city. Trieste was part and parcel of Mittel Europa (Central Europe) as the principal port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trieste only joined Italy in 1954. One can easily imagine that with such a unique history, Trieste is quite a fantastic place to visit. It is. As soon as you arrive in Trieste, you'll notice its ubiquitous coffee houses. Among the best known is the Antico Caffe San Marco. As it befits its internationality, Trieste is home to various historic religious buildings representing many faiths. The Serbian-Orthodox church of the Holy Trinity and Saint Spyridon, built in the mid-Nineteenth century, shows the solid byzantine influence. Go inside for a look at its beautiful frescoes and icons. The Israelite Temple of Trieste, just over a century old, is Italy's largest synagogue. The Trieste Cathedral, dedicated to the city's patron saint, San Guisto (Saint Justus), who was martyred at the beginning of the Fourth Century, was initially built in the Sixth Century on Roman ruins. It is adjacent to a castle of the same name. Walk on its ramparts for an excellent view of the city and its surroundings. There is no shortage of other churches and museums to visit. This is a guide to a trip in the Friuli region of Italy: passing through Grado, Lignano, Aquileia, Trieste, Pordenone, Udine, and touching the mountains of Friuli, the Carnia, Tarvisio, and Sequals. There are extensive descriptions and photos of the attractions. It contains many reviews for the best-recommended restaurants at the location described.