`Trieste and the meaning of nowhere'

Trieste is immensely fortunate to have Jan Morris write a book about it. At 35, she wrote a famous book about Venice. Now its near neighbor is honored to receive her perceptive and eminently stylish attention.

Historically, Trieste was Vienna's outlet to the sea, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it flourished as the only port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When that empire collapsed in 1918, Trieste went into decline. After World War II, no one even knew which country it should belong to. And when Italy finally won it in 1953, Trieste became a real backwater, a port tucked away in a corner and geographically of little use to its new masters.

But now that the states of Eastern Europe are standing in line to join the EU, Trieste finds itself poised to become their quick access to the Suez Canal, and once again a gateway to the sea routes to Asia.

This book is like a congenial conversation with Jan Morris herself, perhaps at a coffeehouse on the central piazza. As Vienna's port, Trieste boasted the best coffee in the world, supplying as it did the world's pre-eminent coffee-drinking city. "I prefer to hang out at the Flora," she writes, and goes on to describe its typical clientele. Only later does she inform you that this particular establishment is in fact no more, and what she has been describing is a scene from a hundred years ago, when Trieste was in its prime. This coy, shrewd, winning mix of the past and present, as well as of the historical and personal, is highly typical of this exceptionally delightful book.

Its style is similar to that of a late Mozart string quartet, one of the group written for the King of Prussia -- wistful, even sad, but nevertheless buoyed by high spirits and energetic playfulness, almost in spite of itself.

Jan Morris is not interested in the tourism based on pious nostalgia currently being promoted in Trieste. Instead, she looks at the compromises and uncertainties that typified the place even in its greatest years, its contradictions and its fallibilities. She is far more at home with great naval vessels, their tonnage almost invariably recorded, than she is with theme parks, and prefers elusive flavors and nebulous regret (both her phrases) to the modern and energetic, though she bravely gives the latter its due.

She views the famous names who lived, however briefly, in Trieste as picturesque cameos. Joyce, Freud, Italo Svevo, Einstein -- they all appear, only to mix with the colorful and polyglot inhabitants, Serbs, Italians, Austrians, and many more.

It's not one of the world's great cities, she writes, but it is in many ways the one she finds most congenial to her own nature. It stands, she says, for the people round the world who she likes and admires the most.

Reading this book about Trieste kept reminding me of Taipei. Both are cities which are reasonably prosperous, of moderate size, less than world.-famous, and that attract relatively few outsiders. Both have, as a result, retained qualities of decency, honesty, innocence and friendliness on almost every hand. They are choice destinations reserved for the most discerning.

Nor is this the only Taiwan connection. Trieste's famous shipping line, Lloyd Triestino, today has Taiwanese owners, and container vessels still depart from Trieste for Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and, presumably most important of all, Kaohsiung.