TRIESTE - Joyce and Maximilian

 TRIESTE.   20-23 May, 2017

James Joyce lived here, as did the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.  So did we briefly. 

   Great location on a generous bay at the top of the Adriatic Sea, living it's own life and not overrun by tourists.

   That's not to say that we did not wake up one morning to find ourselves staring at a giant cruise ship parked 50 metres from our hotel window. But it was gone by early afternoon leaving barely an eddy of tourism in its wake.

   Two things you need to know about Trieste, the Joyce museum is tiny, Maximilian's castle is spectacular. 

   Once the great seaport for the Austrian-Hungarian empire trading with all the world and boasting 45 brothels and crime-ridden back streets, Trieste is now bourgeois respectability itself. 

    Hard to imagine Joyce staying ten years in modern Trieste, so no surprise that his return after WWI was brief. The city that had fertilised his imagination for Ulysses had lost its status, its raison d'etre with the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

     But what a fertile literary decade he had here. Producing The Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles and of course meeting local literary great Italo Svevo, the model for Leopold Bloom the protagonist of Ulysses, many of whose chapters were penned here. 

     Trieste's liberal attitude towards minority groups, including the Jews, had allowed Svevo's and other Jewish families to flourish economically. Many employed Joyce as an English tutor. 

It was that tutor-student relationship between the unpublished young Irishman and the unsuccessfully published older Italian that brought mutual benefit to both. Joyce praised Svevo's work and Svevo provided Joyce with the knowledge about Judaism and the Jews to render his Bloom authentic.

    Encouraged by Professor ‘Zoiss', Svevo wrote “The Confessions of Zeno”, which Joyce, now living in Paris in the early 1920s, forced the international literary establishment, and Italy, to recognise as a comic masterpiece. 

    No such happy ending for Maximilian who designed and built the beautiful Castle Miramare just outside Trieste. The younger brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Josef,  Maximilian unfortunately allowed himself to be persuaded by Napoleon III to become Emperor of Mexico. 

     Despite big brother Franz Josef saying don't do it, Maximilian saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate his skills as a great Hapsburg ruler. His beautiful wife Charlotte, daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium, encouraged him.

     Big mistake. Three years after being proclaimed Emperor of Mexico, the well-intentioned but politically naive and militarily inept Maximilian was facing a Mexican firing squad. Little wonder that Charlotte went mad with grief and regret.

   We have no regrets about visiting modern Trieste. There are memories of the city’s interesting past everywhere, but after bombastic Venice this is an unassuming place. 

   Some say Trieste is the town that time forgot. I say, not really, perhaps it is the town that forgot time and just is.

endlennon