Leaving Trieste

Trieste, for those who don't know the city, is a little pearl of a place on the edge of the Adriatic, far closer to the Former Yugoslavia than to most of Italy, and quite apart from them both.

It's a city of German buildings painted in Italian colors, the Adria profoundly flat, its old docks perfectly empty but with the elegance of a crumbling stately home.

It was Austro-hungarian all its prosperous days, and its prejudices still lean that way among the older families.

Its always been a mix, a Babel, where James Joyce wrote Ulysses, and where blonde ethnic Slovenes with their long shins and freckles make easy strides up impossible hills, cobbled in the overlapping rays of a Roman road.

There is no new money here, no young wealth. On the beach, fat older men display with their trophy wives, with a look of pride and anxiety.

The biggest Synagogue in Europe sits resplendent in the heart of a city mostly without Jews. They stayed on here during the war, feeling secure in their long residence, though thousands fleeing fascism left through this very port, including Albert Einstein.

But in the end, Mussolini went and the Nazis proper came, and the Jews of Trieste were gone.

It's streets are lovely, its people also; like kletzmer music, the sadness of the past is there, but the joy of the moment is too, and it's this that stays with you when the music stops.

A girl in bad, 80's stone-wash jeans and worn ballet flats looks up at me as I pass, with the face of a Renaissance angel and a Czech beer, beside her fat friend on the front step of an old building. I have to turn my shoulder to let past a bald 40 year old riding past on a rusted women's fixie. He passes tourists in Gucci, and patricians of his own city, politely swerving with a look of benevolent Imperium, and precisely half a smile.