GO CULTURE:The Italian city of Trieste, where Joyce lived, retains a magic Dublin has lost, writes Terence Killeen
HERETICAL THOUGH the thought may be, it is possible that the spirit of James Joyce is more alive in the Italian city of Trieste than it is in Dublin. Leopold Bloom, Joyce's hero in Ulysses, at one point starts to compose a song, called If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin nowfor the Gaiety panto (he gets distracted by the underclothing of the principal girl).
If one were to venture to compose a similar ditty, to be called If James Joyce could but come back and see old Dublin now, it would be a long song, with many verses, recording a catalogue of drastic changes that would render the writer's return problematical in the extreme.
He could hardly be said to be coming back to the same city that he left, except in the most formal sense. Some of the buildings remain, it is true, but, far more crucially, Dublin's historical situation is transformed beyond recognition, and in many ways the city Joyce experienced has been negated, erased.
Trieste, on the other hand, gives every impression of remaining in important ways the city that Joyce arrived in during 1904 to teach English, and where he remained, except for a brief sojourn in Rome, until 1914. He returned for a further year after the first World War.
One reason why this is so is that after the first World War Trieste went from being a major port of the Austro-Hungarian empire to becoming a sleepy Italian backwater, just another port in a country with a plethora of them. As a result, Trieste became somewhat frozen in time; its special qualities were preserved, giving it a peculiar time-capsule atmosphere, in many ways more like the Dublin of "Joyce's Dublin" than that city now is. (This strange, slightly ghostly quality to present-day Trieste is best caught in Jan Morris's marvellously evocative Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere).
The principal quality that Trieste exudes and that Dublin conspicuously lacks can be summed up in one word: relaxation.
It is true that we are not comparing like with like, that one is a bustling capital city. But the difference in lifestyle, in attitude, is startling. One city appears to have preserved, and even cultivated, a mode of living that maintains something of the quality of pre-20th-century Europe, the other appears to have definitively lost it.
Both cities now boast James Joyce summer schools, and it is not surprising that the schools reflect the differences between their locations. In one notorious contention between two Irish-based summer schools it was claimed by the partisans of one that at their school they had drinks between lectures, while at the other they had lectures between drinks. Perish the thought that any such crude dichotomy could be used to distinguish the Dublin and Trieste events: both are serious, and at neither does drink play much of a part. But the Trieste school offers a level of bonhomie, of gregariousness that is greatly facilitated by the city in which it is based. Various factors militate against it in Dublin, not least the prices - a significant deterrent to American students in particular.
The Trieste school also benefits from its central European location, both physically and culturally, in being able to draw a strong eastern European contingent, which gives it a special, highly-eclectic flavour. The interest all these people take in Irish matters, often in very minute detail, and not necessarily to do with Joyce, is amazing considering the cultural and linguistic chasms involved, and might shake even the renowned indifference of many native Irish to their own cultural heritage.
As well as the predominant focus on Joyce, the school's director, Dr John McCourt, ensures that a contemporary Irish writer usually attends and contributes. This year's guest was Anne Enright, whose presence was a very enlivening element in this year's school. She had a refreshingly unanxious relationship with her great precursor Joyce, saying she saw his work as a resource to be quarried rather than as a shadow to be struggled against, or shifted. And she confirmed what was already pretty clear, namely that parts of The Gatheringindeed owe something to the Joyce of Dubliners. Enright read very effectively from The Gatheringthat evening and, even more strikingly, the story Until the Girl Died, from her new collection, Taking Pictures- a suitably Bloomian study of adultery, loss, substitution and reconciliation.
The celebrity guest at the 2007 school was of a very different stamp: Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman of the Supreme Court, a man who takes a considerable interest in Joycean matters, especially in a historical context, and is more than happy to talk about them.
Hardiman, clearly a person of very definite opinions, lost no time in setting the entire school by the ears with a strong attack on virtually the entire Joyce industry, especially its theoretical end - an attack, as this was not a courtroom, that was vigorously contested. He followed this up with a lively joust with the Wexford historian Frank Hyland on the role of John Redmond in the pre-first World War years.
His presence did much to produce an animated 2007 summer school. When it came to his own lecture, however, on the crucial Woolsey judgment that freed Ulyssesfor publication in the US in 1933, he offered a careful, lucid account of a complex case in which all the judge's legal training came into its own.
The atmosphere of the Trieste Joyce Summer School has to be experienced to be understood. It is a peculiar mixture of Irish gregariousness - as personified in the figure of John McCourt, that quintessential Irish expatriate - and Italian charm and vivacity, with a dash of Austria-Hungary, the history of Trieste, thrown in.
All in all, it is a heady mix - and as one adds one's voice on a balmy night in a Trieste bar to an Irish ballad that is followed, perhaps, by a Hungarian folk song, one realises again what that other quintessential Irish expatriate, and chronic dissenter, James Joyce has done, and is doing, as a force for cultural harmony in a fragmented and divided Europe.
If more of his spirit lingers in Trieste than in his native Dublin, that may be all to the good.
• Next year's Trieste James Joyce Summer School (www2.units.it/~nirdange/ school/index.html) runs from June 28th to July 4th
Where to go, stay and eat if you're in Trieste
Where to stay
• Urban Hotel Design. 4 Via Androna Chiusa, 00-39-040-302065, www.urbanhotel.it. One of the most elegant hotels in Trieste.
• Hotel Colombia. 18 Via della Geppa, 00-39-040-369333/ 369191, www.hotelcolombia.it. Modernistic lobby leads to old-fashioned and very pleasant rooms.
• Hotel Filoxenia. 3 Via Mazzini, 00-39-040-3481644, www.filoxenia.it. Comfortable and centrally located hotel.
• Hotel James Joyce. 7 Via Cavazzeni, 00-39-040-311023, www.hoteljamesjoyce.com. Inevitably, one called after Joyce. Very comfortable and reasonable, and close to Piazza Unita.
• Grand Hotel Duchi d'Aosta. Piazza Unita d'Italia, 00-39-040-7600011, www.duchi.eu. Situated in the splendid Piazza Unita d'Italia, this one is for the upmarket traveller.
Where to eat
• Città di Pisino. 7 Via Boccardi Alberto, 00-39-040-303706. Particularly good for fish, and a lovely atmosphere.
• Ristorante Da Suban, 2 Via Emilio Comici, 00-39-040-54368. One of the best restaurants in Trieste, complete with photograph of Pope John Paul tucking in.
• Ristorante Pizzeria Mascalzone Latino. 12 Via Cavana, 00-39-040-313332. Excellent pasta dishes.
• Osmiza Milic Stanko. 34 Loc Sgonico, 00-39-040-229164. An agriturismo restaurant situated in the Carso, the limestone plateau above Trieste, very close to the Slovenian border. A visit is a very atmospheric experience.
• Osteria Di Marino. 5 Via Del Ponte, 00-39-040-366596. Off the central Piazza Borsa. A splendid bar-cum-restaurant that is about as evocative of contemporary Triestine life as it gets.
• Caffè San Marco. 18 Via Battisti, 00-39-040-371373. One of the historic Austro-Hungarian-era cafes that are a distinctive feature of Trieste. Well worth a visit to sample the atmosphere.
Where to go
• Cathedral of San Giusto. The cathedral consists of two fifth-century churches, built beside each other, that were linked in the 14th century with a central nave to form one building. Both churches are decorated with very fine late Byzantine mosaics. Joyce's sister Eileen was married here in 1914.
• Castle and Park of Miramare. This is a mid-19th- century Habsburg castle, on the coast about eight kilometres outside Trieste. It was where the tragic Archduke Maximilian stayed before he departed for Mexico and execution.
• Grotta Gigante. To the north of Trieste, an enormous cavern filled with "organ pipe" formations and tall columns of stalagmites.
• Duino Castle is an imposing structure west of Trieste dating from the 1300s, but much built upon subsequently. It was owned by the aristocratic Thurn und Taxis family. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke stayed in the castle in 1911 and 1912 (while Joyce was living in nearby Trieste, though they never met) and wrote his Duino Elegies there.
• Risiera di San Sabba. Opened by the Nazis in 1943, it was the only extermination camp in Italy, and is a national monument today. More than 25,000 people were deported from here - straight to Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz.
• Triestine churches, especially the Greek Orthodox Chiesa di San Nicolò on the seafront and the neo-Byzantine Serb Orthodox Church.
Go there
Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies daily to Trieste Regional Airport, some distance from the city, via Stansted from Belfast, Cork, Derry, Dublin, Kerry, Knock and Shannon