On the road again. Myself and three friends took off for Treviso last week on a half-full Ryanair flight. Our plan was to spend a night in Venice and then head for Trieste by train to embark on a Joycean pilgrimage – visiting as many of the locations he touched as was feasible in three days. The team was well balanced: two could speak Italian, three were reasonably conversant with Joyce’s life and works, and one of us had gone to a lot of trouble to plan
The stop off in Venice was a good idea. We stayed in a fancy hotel (Hotel Papadopoli Venezia)
in the Santa Croce area by the Tolentini Canal – close to the train station for Trieste. The city was almost deserted so after a belt-busting dinner (plus aperitifs, digestifs etc.) we enjoyed an idyllic moonlit stroll around the quiet streets and waterways. And so to bed. The two-and-a-half-hour train journey to Trieste next morning was scenically uninteresting (passing through fertile fruit-growing land and the Prosecco region) until you hit the Adriatic Coast about 30 minutes out from Trieste. The train station was a twenty-minute hike from our hotel (Savoia Ecelsior Palace) but as we all travelled lightly it allowed us to stretch our legs and enjoy the walk along the seafront.
We had timed our trip to coincide with the centenary of the publication of Ulysses but we encountered little evidence of this event being celebrated, or indeed of the fact that Joyce had lived for a considerable period in the city. There were plenty of posters however for a Monet exhibition. The first, and only obvious, indication of Joyce’s presence was a bronze statue by the Trieste-born sculptor Nino Spagnoli on the bridge at Via Roma in the centre of the city. It’s a mediocre work and a poor likeness. It depicts a life-size Joyce looking across the bridge to the building in which the Berlioz School where he first worked was located. A photo opportunity at best.
Our efforts to follow Joyce’s trail on the first day were somewhat compromised by my travelling companions insistence on having a big fat lunch – involving three bottles of wine. After lunch we were good for little except some desultory wandering about (the modest Roman forum caught the eye), followed by a brief snooze. And then on to aperitifs (Negronis of course) and dinner. (
On Saturday we got down to the serious business – starting with breakfast in Joyce’s favourite Pirona café, virtually untouched since his time. We had freshly squeezed orange juice (hand-cranked as we watched), croissants filled with pistachio cream and delicious coffee – followed by some kind of Italian gur cake, heavy on the figs. Every fixture, fitting, and item of food is visual perfection in this establishment – right down to tiles at the entrance. It’s a must from any visitor to Trieste – Joycean or no.
After breakfast we headed to the Joyce Museum. This is not easy to find (on Via Madonna del Mare) – there seems to be no signage to guide you and it involves steep hills and patience. You may be rewarded by the sight of the Arch of Richard, a 1st Century Roman monument on the way. The museum is a beautifully maintained couple of rooms on the first floor of an old prison. One room is dedicated to Joyce’s old buddy Svevo and the other to Joyce. In truth there’s not much to see – a life-size cardboard cut out of the young Joyce (another photo opportunity) and lots of books on shelves behind glass doors. There’s a 15-minute video on Joyce and Svevo that the rather weird and I suspect unwell attendant (tall, stooped, nervous) kept insisting we watch (we didn’t) and an Italian edition of Ulysses in a glass case that looked as if it had been defaced by the local Dadaist.
Then, thanks to our Joyce planner, we had arranged a guided visit around the Anglican Cemetery where Stanislaus Joyce was buried – in a plot that also contained members of the wealthy Lichtensteiger family into which he married. He had contacted the Joyce Museum who put us in touch with a Dr. Giuliano Nadrah. He managed the cemetery and kindly agreed to meet us there. A tall, elderly figure dressed in a stylish dark coat with a smart fedora atop. He was the most amiable and helpful of gentlemen and proved an enthusiastic guide to his beautifully-maintained domain. He was attended by two of his workers who stood in the background and rather creepily shadowed us as we walked around. They had apparently cleaned up the grave pending our visit – a nice touch. One of them it turned out was a transplanted Glaswegian who came to Italy 20 years ago and stayed to work there. His English seemed to have been eroded by time – but the Glasgow accent still lingered. A story there I suspect. Aside from the Joycean relevance, the cemetery with its hill-top location, impressive tombs and multitude of striking cypress trees is worth a visit. Two of our team brought flowers and laid them on the grave - our homage to the man that carried his brother financially for so many years and enabled him to indulge his genius. A convenient bus stop nearby took us back to the centre.
For lunch we headed to the Stella Polare Café (yes we did a lot of eating) where Joyce used to come with his fellow workers from the Berliz school. This spot is more suited to lounging about for a while than the smaller Pirona – which has only outdoor seating. We settled for modest fare here – delicious sandwiches and sundry savoury stuff. Joyce maintained that the cafés in Rome were much inferior to those in Trieste and the Pirona and the Stella Polare prove his point.
After lunch we planned to watch the Ireland/Wales match in some suitable bar but found to our chagrin that nowhere was showing it. This was surprising when you consider that nearby Treviso is one of the main rugby-playing areas in Italy. Sadly, and anti-climactically, we had to return to our hotel and watch it in an empty lobby on our largest laptop. We ordered beer and had good fun anyway - seeing Wales getting hammered at rugby outranks most cultural experiences.
On the final day (a Sunday) we emulated Joyce by attending a 10 o’clock service at the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas on the seafront. This was a rare treat. The church was unusual for me in that it had a wall, richly decorated in gold and silver, with two entrances separating the nave from the altar (the technical term for this is an iconostasis and is apparently common in Eastern churches). There were candles everywhere and much toing and froing with them throughout the ceremony – lighting them, passing them to the celebrants, quenching them and generally carrying on with them non-stop. There was an impressive live choir on the go throughout and the priest who interacted with them had a great voice for the job. And he had an array of gorgeous costumes – including a change of head-dress for the finale. He came and went theatrically between the nave and his position at the altar behind the wall. He’d emerge, strut his stuff, and then go back in to conduct some hidden rite. The congregation of about a 100 mostly stood – or wandered about lighting candles. There was a huge amount of bowing and making the sign of the cross – almost non-stop. And of course much play with incense – the priest shaking it about with gay abandon. Why can’t our church services be such fun? I’d certainly make a comeback if they went for this model. The plate was passed around much to my cashless embarrassment and at the end kids went up to take sweets from a plate held by one of the satellite celebrants. Great stuff.
Trieste is a pleasant and uncluttered city to walk around – with handsome buildings and wide squares part of its Austro-Hungarian heritage. It has a comfortable bourgeois feel to it – no begging or overt signs of poverty. Apparently its economy is no longer based on its deep-sea port but rather on its reputation as a major research location with an inordinate number of international organisations based there. I saw no evidence of any tourists apart from ourselves – not even a fellow-Joycean. We were blessed with mild weather the whole time we were there and only a brief spit or two of rain. There were any number of good-quality, modestly priced restaurants – mostly Italian food but we also found a couple of German-style places with bench seats and hearty plates of meat and sausage – accompanied by that godawful sauerkraut. The best of the many restaurants we sampled was the modestly-priced Restaurant Giustina Gianfranco on the Via Felice Venezian. It was run by a young couple who had spent time in Dublin and spoke excellent English. At night the populace, or at least the younger element, took to the streets. There was modest drinking and much chatting and moving around. I didn’t see a single drunk or ever feel unsafe even in the narrow back streets. The people were unfailingly friendly and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who fancies a break away from the frenzy of Venice. Especially when summer comes and you can swim in the very accessible Adriatic.
If we wanted a more wide-ranging literary pilgrimage we should not have missed a trip to see Duino Castle nearby where Rilke wrote his Elegies and where Dante is alleged to have written some lines for his Divine Comedy. We also skipped the spectacular Miramar Castle which so impressed Ibsen.
I should mention that I put on 2.5 kilos in four days.
