We stand with her at the Obelisk that marks the Habsburg city limits and look down on the old walled city and its modern neighbour as she reflects on the city’s present and its interrupted past.

La sinossi non spiega che Jan Morris era con le truppe angloamericane che entrarono a Trieste e ci liberarono dai tedeschi. I love books that take places that seem unremarkable, if assessed against a set of criteria that favours general tourist appeal, and show a different side to travel.From the 14th to the early 20th centuries it was ruled by the Habsburg monarchy as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Her books on Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Hong Kong and Sydney are remarkable evocations of those places. Al soffio della bora, Jan Morris ha avvertito i molteplici spiriti della città agitarsi: fiera e ambigua, squallida e aristocratica, ospitale e razzista, latina e slava, occidentale e orientale, maschile e femminile.

She says it’s not a city for pedants – it has its own rhythm, and it’s not a tourist rhythm or even that of a hub of mercantilism. Morris devotes a lot of the book to this period, which appears to be, in her mind, the heyday of Trieste. 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. Obviously I was more interested in Trieste and less interested in Jan Morris's feelings about Trieste. Through Trieste, Morris finds the nowhere that is everywhere and claims the city as the natural home to everyone whose unfulfilled longings are as important to them as their grandest accomplishments.Trademarks of the Morris literary style - the use of sound effects to bring out the ambience, anecdotes laced with humour, and, above all, an affectionate enthusiasm - run through the book. No fim de contas, Morris celebra Trieste como «A capital de lugar nenhum», uma terra de acolhimento para todos os que, como ela, sempre se sentiram um pouco perdidos, sem nunca chegarem verdadeiramente a encontrar uma pátria. Morris considered herself to be Welsh, through her Welsh father, although she was born and raised in England.

It seems that it existed on two planes for her – the real (when she was there) and the imagined (when she was away). At its best, the prose, is charged with meaning and evidence of months, years of meditation on the city… and therefore of life in general and Morris’ life in particular. James Joyce lived there for a number of years, learning to speak the local dialect and writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and most of Dubliners.As a consequence, places, people, views, feelings I know so well kicked in, in my memory, in such a powerful way that sometimes I felt like I was losing the point of view of the author. It was there that, arguably, James began his writing career having formed part of the British occupying forces at the end of WW2. Morris is astoundingly well read and while I do know a thing or two, it was hard to keep up sometimes.

On our first half-day in town, I referred to so many passages in the book that you'd think it was a travel guide. What was the function of the small park opposite the rail station in the early 1990s after the Berlin Wall fell? Nieces, nephews and now great-nieces have been teaching me this for a while, but it feels like it’s getting more obvious lately that I’m edging towards that unknown territory that Morris refers to. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. I know the book is both an elegy for Trieste's past and Morris's, but these views make me deeply uneasy.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. Ao longo de páginas de uma escrita fascinante a autora encantou o leitor, que ficou com um crescente vontade de visitar tal local. So there's a uninformed temptation to think of her mostly as a historian; moreover, one who somewhat aggrandizes empire. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach.