Trieste: The Empire’s Port, the Empire’s Cup
by Joseph Harris
Every city on this coast has a mother. Genoa has the sea, Venice has the lagoon, Naples has the volcano. Trieste has a decree. In 1719 the Emperor Charles VI declared a fishing town at the top of the Adriatic a free port of the Habsburg Empire, and his daughter Maria Theresa spent the next forty years building a city to fit the paperwork. She dredged the harbor, laid out the streets on a grid, and told the world that anyone could come and trade there without paying duty on what they brought. Greeks came, and Serbs, and Jews from every corner of Europe; Germans, Slovenes, Hungarians, Armenians, Englishmen. The Italians were already there, and they stayed. Trieste is the one city in Italy that was designed to be everybody’s.
That is why it does not cook like anywhere else in the country. Every other region in this book gathers its own people around its own table. Trieste set a table for four nations at once. Vienna sent the boiled pork and the horseradish, the strudel and the caraway. Budapest sent paprika and sour cream and a stew that came up the coast from Fiume, the empire’s Hungarian port, forty miles away, where the two harbors traded sailors and cooks for two hundred years. Slovenia sent the Carso — the limestone plateau that rises straight up behind the city — with its beans and barley and poppy seed. And Venice, which ruled every other port on this sea for five hundred years and never got this one, sent its cooking anyway, by boat, in the marinated anchovies and the fish stew that the Triestini took in and gave a local accent. The city speaks all four in the same sentence and hears no contradiction.
It also drinks coffee, and that is the real subject of this chapter. Coffee came into the free port duty-free from the Ottoman trade, and by 1800 Trieste was the door through which the bean entered central Europe. The cafés of the city — San Marco, degli Specchi, Tommaseo, Pirona — are not Italian espresso bars where you drink standing at the counter in ninety seconds. They are Viennese rooms: marble tables, newspapers on wooden poles, a waiter who leaves you alone for three hours. The city even has its own vocabulary. Order a capo in b and you get a small macchiato in a glass, and if you order a macchiato instead they will know you are from somewhere else.
The man who made Trieste the coffee capital of Italy was not Italian. Francesco Illy was born in Temesvár, in the Hungarian half of the empire, and arrived in Trieste as a soldier in the Great War. He stayed, married into the city, and in 1933 founded the company that carries his name. Two years later he patented the first espresso machine that used pressurized water rather than steam, which is the machine every bar in Italy runs on today. So the cup that closes an Italian meal was engineered by a Hungarian in a Habsburg port. Trieste is the only place in Italy where that sentence sounds ordinary.
He was not the only immigrant who came for the port and stayed for the table. In 1904 a broke Irishman named James Joyce stepped off the train with his girlfriend and a job teaching English at the Berlitz school, and he stayed, on and off, for eleven years. He wrote Dubliners at the tables of the cafés, most of A Portrait of the Artist, and the first chapters of Ulysses. One of his private students was a middle-aged businessman named Ettore Schmitz, who ran a marine-paint company and had published two novels under the name Italo Svevo that nobody had read. Joyce read them, told him he was a writer, and would not let it go. Svevo went home and wrote Zeno’s Conscience, and Joyce spent the 1920s telling Paris about it until Paris listened. Leopold Bloom owes a great deal to Ettore Schmitz. The city that let the foreigner in got its own great novelist back, which is the free port working exactly as Maria Theresa intended.
Joyce took his coffee at Caffè Pirona, and he took his pastry there too: presnitz, the coiled roll of nuts and dried fruit that the city baked to honor an empress. Pirona still stands on Largo della Barriera Vecchia and still sells it. I have left the presnitz to the page, because the dessert that belongs on the plate tonight is the one with coffee in it. Thirty kilometers up the coast, in Pieris, a roadside restaurant called the Vetturino has served a dish of espresso-soaked savoiardi and mascarpone since before anyone in the Veneto had heard of it. Treviso took the name and the credit; Venice has been taking the coast’s dishes home and renaming them since the doges. Tonight the tiramisù is made in Trieste’s kitchen with Trieste’s coffee, and the credit goes back up the road to Pieris.
Trieste became Italian in 1918, when the empire it was built for came apart, and it has spent a century since being Italian in its own way — which is to say with a strudel in the pastry case and a gulasch on the menu and a coffee house where the bar should be. The menu tonight is drawn to that map. The soup is Austrian, pumpkin and caraway under sour cream, and the salad beside it is Hungarian, cucumber and onion in the same cream with paprika over it. The pasta is Slovenian, from the villages on the Carso: flat noodles in brown butter with poppy seed ground fresh, a feast-day dish that families made when they had flour, eggs, butter, and a poppy head from the garden and not much else. I have laid crisp sage over it, which no one on the Carso would have done and which is the most Italian thing a cook can put on a plate. The ribs are Hungarian by way of Szeged — pork braised in paprika and sauerkraut until the two become one thing — with the city’s own potatoes crushed and fried with pancetta beside them, and fresh horseradish grated over for Vienna. Then the tiramisù, and then the cup.
Four nations, one table, one cup to close. The free port is a long way from Laurel Street, but the idea travels well: set the table for everyone, and see who stays.
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