Trieste, that most singular Italian city, perched somewhat uncomfortably in the upper reaches of the Adriatic, almost totally surrounded by Slovenia, within easy reach of Austria, is not a city which immediately appeals to the popular imagination. Known, perhaps, only by virtue of the fact that it was home to James Joyce for more than 10 years, for most it is undiscovered territory; not the sort of place about which one might normally write a travel book. But to call Jan Morris's Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere a travel book would be as reductive and wrong as calling Hamlet a soap opera.
Elegant and eloquent, it offers a profound and significant meditation on the city which has haunted her for more than 50 years, ever since she (then the 19-year-old boy James Morris) arrived to serve there as a soldier at the end of the second World War. She portrays it as an alluring no-man's land caught between eastern and western Europe, a major port which is perhaps the most thoroughly mixed of European cities, and yet one which defies most standard categorisations.
What immediately is apparent is that Trieste is a unique city, part Italian, part Slav, part Austrian, a cosmopolitan melting-pot. Morris traces its historical development through its Indo-Celtic, Roman, Venetian origins, then, in more detail, under the Habsburgs "who brought it into the modern world" as the main seaport of their Empire - "one of the great achievements of Habsburg imperialism". Moving into more recent times, she describes the post-first World War transition into Italy, the uncertain future following the second World War when it was prized by Yugoslavia and finally the "bewildered and disconsolate place" it became under the control of an Anglo-American administration before it was definitively handed back to Italy in the 1950s.
Part of Trieste's tragedy was that in this agreement it lost its natural hinterland of Istria to Yugoslavia. This fact, almost as much as the loss of purpose that came after the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated, gave Trieste "its sense of deprivation". Badly treated by history, the city that was once Austria's Urbs Fedelissima languished and turned provincial in the 20th century, sought in vain for a defining role for itself and fumbled about for a future like a millionaire who has lost his safe. Only in the last decade has Trieste begun to re-emerge with conviction. It is, Morris tells us, as if the place had been given a strong course of viagra. Suddenly it is rediscovering its mission at the centre of Mitteleuropa - a bridge between East and West, developing itself as a major port, as a centre of science, a writers' city (Joyce, Rilke, Burton, Charles Lever, Stendhal, and more recently, Claudio Magris).
It is putting aside its differences with its former Yugoslavian neighbours, looking outwards and reclaiming its Austro-Hungarian heritage, tidying itself up for the few intrepid travellers who take the trouble to go off the beaten tracks to Venice and Florence to discover it.
Make no mistake about it, Jan Morris likes and deeply cares for Trieste. This book is a celebratory farewell to a city which has offered her moments of solace, insight and personal epiphany. Her Trieste is a calm but complete city, free of hassle, a friendly, loitering kind of place, cluttered with coffee-shops. She presents it in a style which mirrors this, having her reader meander through the town's Italian and Austrian quarters, explore its multiple identities and its mixture of races and religions, inhale its rich odour of coffee, meet its prosperous population planted there in exile from all over Europe and beyond. For Morris, no pompous discourses but direct statements ("Melancholy is Trieste's chief rapture"), and anecdotal illustrations which juxtapose images, scenes and cameos of people and institutions from a great past with present day, quotidian Trieste, a "crepuscular city". Thus, its multiculturalism, its "old fusion of bloodstocks" is illustrated through the example of its highly successful recent mayor, Riccardo Illy, whose paternal grandfather was from Transylvania while his grandmother was half-Irish and half-Austrian. Another section is devoted to a moving depiction of the Jewish diaspora, which "flourished mightily" and became prominent in Trieste as nowhere else in the empire, only to be suppressed under Italian Fascism and systematically eliminated after the Nazis took control of Trieste after Italy signed an armistice with the Western powers.
Among the most powerful elements of the book are its depiction of Trieste as a microcosm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a city in which all of Europe is distilled, and its subsequent meditation on race and nation, those concepts which caused such havoc in the 20th century. For Morris, the mixture of races which have co-existed and fused in Trieste makes a nonsense of the nationalism, for which so many of her generation and her father's fought and died but which is often nothing more than offensive chauvinism. "If race is a fraud, as I often think it is in Trieste," Morris concludes, "then nationality is a pretence", with nothing organic to it.
In the end, Trieste is celebrated as a deeply human city where people have time for you; "a capital of nowhere" where the common currency is kindness, a place where geniality and melancholy meet; in short "as near to a decent city as you can find".
John McCourt teaches at the University of Trieste. His book, The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920, was published in paperback earlier this year