Trieste was for her, the “Capital of Nowhere”, an illusory Fourth World populated by people who, like her, felt like outsiders or “exiles in their own communities”. Inside, I’m not the chronological age I am, but I know that the people who are the age I feel view me as that chronological age.

I don't think this description is quite right, though, and consequently it's not very helpful to potential readers. La sinossi non spiega che Jan Morris era con le truppe angloamericane che entrarono a Trieste e ci liberarono dai tedeschi. It’s easy to tell your own story about a place, and easy to impart a history lesson, but very hard to make your own experiences interesting and relevant to a general audience. In the chapter titled “Only the Band Plays On”, she vividly imagines a scene taking place in the Piazza Unità, a large public square facing the sea, in 1897. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach.Trieste belonged in that select company of the once mighty now brought low, but with enough evidence left over still to inspire bouts of melancholy, nostalgia and romantic regret. She walks us through modern Trieste, as she knew it at the time of writing, comparing it to other places picked up by an imperial invader and then left to its own devices. Antonio Smareglia in the shadow of the arena in Pula, the same Smareglia whose operas were staged at the Teatro Verdi, the same acronym VERDI which became a touchstone for Italian irredentism. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared… The Caffè Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct… Those silken and epauletted passengers, with all they represented, have vanished from the face of Europe, and I am left all alone listening to the band.

This is possibly why Morris considers it so fascinating because it, of course, allows the book to explore all sorts of issues with identity… a subject that is of some relevance for someone who has made the transition to transgender. So that when I finally walked out into the city on that first morning, I was thoroughly unprepared for what met me. Morris devotes a lot of the book to this period, which appears to be, in her mind, the heyday of Trieste. I picked it from my local library as my second book in this year’s Dewithon, hosted by Paula at the Bookjotter blog.It was the same park where 90 years earlier, Joyce had left his mistress Nora while he went to pick a drunken fight in the city centre. I was therefore fascinated by accounts of these two residents of the city and how it had, possibly, influenced their writing. This is Jan Morris‘s melancholy love letter to a city that was formed by a dozen different civilizations over the course of four thousand years but seems not to belong to any of them. In the twenty-first century, Trieste streets are jammed like any other European city with a quarter of a million people. First of all, I don't often read travel writing of this type, but as I love the city of Trieste and am prepping to take a group of students there next week and a former roommate left a copy of this laying around my apartment.

Over the years I have learnt only occasionally to look back on it with shame (the fundamental principle of empire having soured on all of us), but more often with a mixture of pride, affection and pathos.

It’s not just the weirdness of the past 12 months that is changing my understanding of time, it really is condensing in the sense that waiting for things to happen doesn’t have the same impatience of expectation.