Free Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris Page A

City. The pine-woods on the slopes of the Karst were planted specifically to shield the city from it. Sometimes railway wagons used to be blown over by it, and long ago in some streets railings were attached to the walls for pedestrians to hang on to. Trieste makes the most of its bora. On the wind-rose at the end of the Molo Audace, on the central waterfront, the four conventional Mediterranean winds occupy their usual places on the roundel, but the bora is all alone, away at the edge, a wind spectacularly on its own. Local historians assure us that the outcome of a battle fought up on the Karst in A.D. 394 was so affected by a bora—they call it the Battle of the Bora—that it led directly to the end of the Roman Empire.
    Citizens love their visitors to encounter this most Triestine of experiences, and they have celebrated the bora in wry art and anecdote. The artist Carlo Wostry, who died in 1943 and declared it to be “the only original thing we have,” did a famous series of bora cartoons—skirts flying, top hats tumbling, horses halted in their tracks, papers whisked about all over the place and women huddling in phalanx to keep themselves upright. They say the bora is cyclical, and blew less frequently in the last decades of the twentieth century, but when one morning I opened my curtains in the first year of the twenty-first, I was delighted to see the old monster whipping through the trees below, sending the leaves scudding madly across the sidewalks and boiling the lethargic sea.
    However, whenever down the years I have been caught by the bora in full blast, it has left me strangely disturbed. I love demonstrations of nature in the raw, but when this fearful zephyr has howled away I feel curiously enervated or desolate. Stendhal, in 1839, defined the sensation as rheumatism in his entrails, and perhaps it is the source of Trieste’s endemic hypochondria. Imaginary illnesses have always been prevalent here, in literature as in life. Svevo’s fictional alter ego Zeno suffers every kind, eventually reaching the conclusion that a maladie imaginaire is worse than the real thing because it is incurable. During his stay here James Joyce experienced as many fanciful afflictions as real ones, and I myself, as I write, seem to feel a peculiarly developing pain in my right ear-lobe. I was once woken in the night by a portentous flashing of lights through my window. Rushing to my balcony I saw that offshore a great cruise ship was standing, brilliantly illuminated, while below me on the quay, lights were blinking urgently on a police car and a white ambulance. A passenger on the ship was being brought ashore for surgery; but ominous though the spectacle was, and awful his predicament, as I returned sleepy to my bed I could not help wondering if, being where he was when the emergency seized him, he was not fancying the whole thing.
    Imagine the accumulated psychological deposits of a million boras, deposited in this city over the millennia and augmented by sundry more tangible despairs, and it is not surprising that in recent times Trieste has not been naturally blithe.
    IT WAS not always so. Before the gods of capitalism adopted Trieste, before it was properly Austrianized, visitors thought it a regular beaker-full of the warm south, joyous with Latin vivacity.
    The young German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, arriving in 1803 and still half aghast at the awfulness of the Karst, was delighted by its lively night-life. Soon afterwards a Romanian traveller, Dinco Golescu, felt much the same, and wrote of a city brilliant with great lanterns, and an opera audience of three thousand so moved by the performance of the evening, and so emotionally uninhibited, “that I hardly saw one hundred who did not have to wipe their eyes.” Nowadays not so many Triestini cry in public, even when Signor Lupi is singing, and going to the opera is not the heart-on-sleeve experience it can be in more Italianate parts of Italy. Over the