Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Product Information

The false passion of the nation-state made my conceptual Europe no more than a chimera: and because of nationality the city around me that day, far from being a member of some mighty ideal whole, was debilitated in loneliness. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

Her reflections on Trieste, written as a much older Jan Morris, contemplate her own status as a person born between genders, and Trieste as a city between worlds, linked backed to Vienna and Austria as the Mediterranean sea port for the Habsburg Empire. They divorced after Morris’ sex reassignment surgery, but remained together and later became civil partners when those partnerships were legalized in Wales. Reputada autora de livros de viagens, este é um dos seus livros mais belos, circunstância a que não é estranho o tom de despedida que perpassa por estas páginas. The message, which had been agreed upon in advance to protect their scoop, said “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.

The way I think about it is, I’ve more of my life behind me than I have in front, and the years of feeling a responsibility towards getting it right, making decisions that impact on a relatively distant future, are turning into the years of living for the moment.

All around me first-class passengers, awaiting the time to board their ship, are enjoying their last half-hour on Austrian solid before sailing away to America, Alexandria or the east… There are splashes of colour everywhere – braids and gilded epaulets, bright silks of summer, gaudy parasols and pink fringed reticules. Firstly, Trieste's history is far too complex a matter to be seen as merely 'Italian', as anyone who's read the book ought to know. We were doing a grand tour of Venice, Florence, San Marino and their favorite Italian city – Riccione. Or it's peculiar geographic location, shoehorned in among Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and the rest of Italy.Over the years I have learnt only occasionally to look back on it with shame (the fundamental principle of empire having soured on all of us), but more often with a mixture of pride, affection and pathos. Manchester in the second half of the 19th century was a partly Germanic city, thanks to the arrival of engineers such as Charles Beyer and Hans Renold, the textile manufacturer Friedrich Engels Senior, and the pianist-conductor Charles Hallé, but also had a large Italian population and an Armenian merchant community, among others. Desta feita, li o último dos livros deste tipo que a autora escreveu e publicou em 2001 dedicado à cidade italiana/austríaca de Trieste. In those moments, Morris said the city appeared clearly to her and stirred up feelings of hiraeth, a “sweet melancholy [that] illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations, too. Probably, this fact is why, if the book had imbued with melancholy, it opens on the future by announcing possible evolutions of the city (it is a chapter which is welcome).