The very name, Trieste, is redolent of sadness: I’m thinking of Françoise Sagan’s novel. I went for a Ryanair weekend in 2008 and, to avoid repetition, you can read about it in a post misleadingly titled Tahiti .
I didn’t mention the art on the walls of our hotel, the decanter of sherry to refresh oneself gratis or the quite good haircut. Well, I’ve mentioned all that now. Twelve years later I’m back in Trieste with Richard Bassett and remembering the spectacular Miramare Castle. Here’s how it struck him in his engaging memoir, Last Days in Old Europe.
“At nearby Miramare Castle, a white limestone castello built by the Archduke Maximilian, who was later to become first and last Emperor of Mexico, there is a painting of a Royal Navy launch manned by British sailors. They are saluting Franz Josef and the Empress Elisabeth stepping off the boat, but the artist, Cesar Dell’Acqua, has clearly been far more captivated by the long, thin distinguished face of the English naval officer and his handsome crew than by the Habsburgs.
For Blanka’s generation, Britain indeed ruled the waves. Miramare was an hour’s stroll along the coast from Blanka’s apartment. The contrast between its white limestone walls and the blue sea and sky is another unforgettably vivid Triestine moment. The Archduke Maximilian, Franz Josef’s brother, had come ashore near here after a Bora storm had capsized his yacht and he had immediately fallen in love with the place. The construction of the castle and its gardens occupied his mind right up to his violent death in Mexico in 1867. Inveigled by Napoleon III into accepting the “throne” of Mexico, Maximilian had slowly recognised the folly of French machinations, but enlightenment arrived too late. A few days before the firing squad paraded to execute him, a scene immortalised in Manet’s famous painting, the final details of his castle had filled his last waking moments: he had ordered Miramare’s garden pavilions to be filled with nightingales. The castle’s gardens include cypresses sent from Mexico as well as camellias, myrtle and laurel. Perhaps the thought of his enduring legacy at Miramare helped Maximilian face the firing squad with equanimity. The small black waistcoat he wore that day, which has survived, displays six bullet holes all close to the heart, a tribute to Mexican marksmanship and to their Emperor’s unflinching character.”
Richard Bassett was Central European and Eastern European correspondent for The Times. Adam Zamoyski expatiates in The Literary Review.
“Richard Bassett is no ordinary journalist. An accomplished musician with a doctorate in architectural history, he is also a gourmet whose appetite is not limited to food and drink. He is a dedicated observer of people and things, whom no detail escapes … The book includes curious encounters with, among others, Shirley Temple, alongside whom he sheltered from Czech riot police. There are poignant vignettes, of Kohl, Gorbachev and Dubček, some Schloss-hopping, a hilarious visit to the officers’ mess of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards at Wolfenbüttel. Whatever may be happening around him, Bassett at no points loses his taste for the recondite, and this amiable tour is never less than entertaining.”
I am only on page twenty-six but I already know I’m in the hands of a great travel writer in the tradition of Leigh Fermor, Morris and Newby. I’m immensely grateful to the friend who recommended him but I wish I was reading in the dining car of a train pulling out of Vienna Südbahn bound for Trieste Centrale.
You mentioned Morris but not her book “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere”. She writes of Miramare:
” The castle has often been unlucky, and gloomy legend attends it. The Empress Elizabeth, Franz Joseph’s consort, [he was Maximilian’s elder brother] often stayed there, and was eventually stabbed to death at Geneva. Carlotta [Maximilian’s widow] briefly lived there, and in the end went off her head. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II stayed there once, and soon had to abdicate his throne. The first King of Albania spent a few nights there, and his throne lasted only six months… When the British General Freyburg chose it as his headquarters at the end of the Second World War, he preferred to be on the safe side, and slept in the garden; but one of his American successors defied superstition and was later killed in Korea, and another died in a car crash on his way back to Trieste from the United States.”
Might not a second visit be tempting fate?
A marvellous book, I agree – I read it in two days after meeting the delightful author (who was recovering from prostate cancer) last autumn. My favourite scene is the tea party presided over by the Empress Zita, at the Austrian Schloss where she made regular illicit visits from her home in Switzerland.