Trieste and…a lapse

After a wonderful week in Slovenia, it was time to move on. For some unknown reason, there was no train that day to where we were going, so Amy, Griffin, my mom and I waited in the heat for a bus instead. It was late, but once we got on, with all our luggage—alongside a motley bunch of young backpackers—we were rewarded with a quiet, comfortable and air-conditioned ride. (The buses in Europe may not be as comfortable and convenient as the trains, but are still pretty great…much better than our Greyhound!) Over the Slovenian mountains we went, westward, then dropping down to an Italian port city called Trieste. Ever heard of it? We hadn’t either. Wwe were only stopping here to break up an otherwise long journey to Venice…but we were glad we did.

Looking at a map of Trieste, the first thing you’ll notice is how the Italian border has been painstakingly contorted to include this strategic city, looking rather like a gerrymandered legislative district. In fact, this border was only settled as recently as 1975. At the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste was the fourth most important center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (after Vienna, Budapest and Prague) and the biggest city on the “Austrian Riviera” (remember the Austrian Navy from The Sound of Music?). After WWI, the city was annexed by Italy. During WWII, it was occupied by German troops and was the site of a major concentration camp (which we declined to visit) and some intense Allied bombing raids. In 1945, it was liberated and seized by Tito, who declared it part of Yugoslavia; but under pressure from Stalin and the Allies, it was quickly relinquished and became an independent city state, the “Free Territory of Trieste”, that was occupied by American and British forces for nearly a decade. In 1954, this territory was divvied up between Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, leaving most of the city of Trieste within Italy, and these borders were made permanent twenty years later.

(Side note: These borders left Slovenia with a measly 29 miles of coastline, which I understand is about 1 inch per resident! But enough for a couple of cute seaside resort towns which retain a strong Italian flavor…and where Italian is still one of the official languages.)

Long story short, while cities like Rome or Florence are quintessentially Italian, Trieste is not. It has its own distinct identity and even its own dialect (called Triestine, a form of Venetian). Despite large eastward migrations after WWII, there remains a significant minority of Slovenes within the city, as well as Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Greeks, and others. In short, a diverse place.

And while it’s not very large—the city proper only has a little over 200,000 residents—Trieste is a bustling place, topping the list of Italy’s biggest port cities, home to Europe’s largest shipbuilding company and several other multinationals, the start of a major oil pipeline to central Europe, and an integral part of the maritime Silk Road to Asia and Africa. Perhaps its productivity is due to the fact that it’s also considered the Italian coffee capital—it’s the country’s (and the Mediterranean’s) greatest coffee port, supplying more than 40% of Italy’s coffee. (Thank you, Trieste!) The famous brand Illy (Amy’s favorite) was founded here, and we visited their flagship café on the waterfront more than once in our 2 days there.

I was surprised that we’d never heard of Trieste, but it’s simply not a big international tourist destination. Our first evening there, a pair of teenage girls volunteering for an environmental organization approached us In the city’s splendid main plaza. They were puzzled that we didn’t speak Italian, and after we managed to communicate that we were from California, they were almost dumbfounded. They just don’t get a lot of Americans here. But they do get some European tourists, as we discovered upon seeing a cruise ship anchored in the port each of the next two mornings. It’s a shame it’s not better appreciated. Despite how industrialized it is, we found Trieste both fascinating and (sometimes) rather beautiful.

After getting off the bus and, hauling our luggage a kilometer to the hotel, and getting settled in, we immediately set out into the sweltering heat to find a meal alongside Treste’s Grand Canal, which is not particularly grand and serves no apparent purpose except to beautify about three blocks of the city. But that it does well, and we dined at a pretty great restaurant where I got my first authentic Italian pizza of this trip. (It was so great, we came back the next night for dinner!) A little while later, we headed back out into the heat on one of my spontaneous, self-guided walking tours of the city, worried that we had only this one afternoon to see the place since it was supposed to rain for the rest of our stay. Our first stop was a steep hill in the middle of town, upon which we found an impressive marble staircase, a centuries-old triangular castle, the foundations of a Roman forum, and an unexpectedly beautiful Gothic cathedral built in 1320. We lingered a while to take photos of the sunlight pouring in through the old rose window. Then down the steep, narrow cobblestoned streets we went, finding a Roman arch and a few more churches, the old Roman amphitheater, and a wonderful little back alley vegetarian restaurant, where we enjoyed a simple but absolutely fantastic meal. Afterwards, we found our way out to the city’s waterfront main square, where throngs of people dined outside in the slightly cooler evening. We admired the grand old buildings and watched the sun set over the Adriatic while Griffin spotted dozens of jellyfish in the water. It had only been a few hours, but our low expectations of Trieste were blown away, and we found ourselves fairly delighted with this understated town.

All that being said…now that we were in Italy, we immediately noticed some significant differences from Slovenia and Austria. First, it was just so much more tawdry, dirty, and overgrown here. No more lush and manicured parks—Trieste’s were dry and weed-infested. The copious bicycles we’d seen in Graz and Ljubljana were replaced here with obnoxious motorbikes, scooters and mopeds which belched exhaust fumes. Trash littered the streets. And while drivers in Slovenians were polite to a fault, you quickly learned not to step out in front of vehicles in Trieste, because they rarely stopped. I might chalk all this up to the city’s industrial nature, except that I’ve noticed this same trend in every other Italian city we’ve visited since. It seems that the Italians just didn’t give a f***. More on that in a future post.

To be fair, my experience of Trieste might have been colored by the fact that for the first time on our trip, we weren’t staying in an Airbnb—Amy had instead booked a pair of cheap hotel rooms for my mom and us. The shabby old place was perfectly okay but so much less welcoming and comfy than the homes we’d been staying in, right down to the ambivalent receptionist. We hadn’t realized just how good we’d had it until now.

There’s not much else to say about Trieste. It ended up not raining much the next day, but it did cool off, so we did more exploring, including visiting an incredible little chocolate shop dating from 1836, checking out a Serbian Orthodox cathedral, and heading out to see an interesting lighthouse. As it was Saturday, Amy didn’t have to work, and my mom watched Griffin that night while Amy and I went out for a drink at a funny little bar called Mast, decorated with American rock & roll posters, where we sat in swings instead of chairs and enjoyed some of the best (but also the cheapest) cocktails on this trip. The next morning, we had brunch at the Illy coffeeshop, bid arrivederci to Trieste, then boarded a train for our next stop: Venice.

A lapse

Spoiler alert: the remainder of this post contains some lamentations from yours truly, who has absolutely no right to lament anything right now! Proceed at your own risk…of utterly failing to feel bad for me. 😉

As I write this, it’s been nearly four weeks since we left Trieste. So why am I so behind on our blog? I mean, what the heck else do I have going on? I’m basically unemployed right now (many thanks to Amy, who is supporting us on her income alone), and the only obligations I have each day are to do a little homeschooling with Griffin (which sometimes doesn’t happen), help plan out our future travels, and maybe make a few meals and do some dishes. So how is a productive guy like me managing to be so darn unproductive? Have I relaxed so fully that I can’t even muster the energy to write about our travels? Am I drunk on cheap Italian wine? Or I have I just sort of given up on this project?

None of those. Truth is, this blog is pretty important to me, if only as a way to remember our travels. I have a pretty great memory for some things, like facts and concepts that interest me and how to navigate around places I’ve been. But I have an pretty awful long-term memory for things I’ve seen and done and people I’ve met. Case in point: when we visited the Sistine Chapel a few weeks ago, I realized I had absolutely no memory of seeing it 17 years earlier. It’s like I was experiencing it for the first time. Same with the Roman Pantheon. Things like that should have made an impression. But apparently not an indelible one, at least not for me. So, like Julianne Moore’s character in Still Alice or Guy Pearce’s in Memento (I think…I don’t remember films terribly well either!), I have to write things down or risk losing them through the many cracks in my memory. (Movies like those, and questions of how memory is an integral part of our identity, are particularly intriguing for me.) This blog is essentially a diary for me, so I’m not just going to let it go—I have too much invested in this trip to forget it.

(Meanwhile, both Amy and I wonder just how much Griffin will remember of this adventure, as he’s right at that moment in childhood before which most people have little or no memory. How much do you remember from age 6?)

The biggest obstacle to my diary-keeping over the past few weeks is just how busy we’ve been. We’ve covered a lot of ground during that time, visiting Trieste, Venice, Rome, the Vatican, Sorrento, Pompeii, Capri, Ischia, and now Vietri Sul Mare. All incredible, even epic, places which we’re incredibly lucky to see. And in each, I’m embarrassed to say, we’ve been acting a heck of a lot like…American tourists. Not unlike the sort who buy tours from the travel company I worked for for years. Those folks are generally retirees, who finally have both the leisure time and the resources to venture out and see all those legendary places they’ve seen and heard about their whole lives. We’ve come across a lot of them while we’ve been here, piling out of tour buses and ferry boats, clumping up around tour guides, rushing around trying to jam it all in. I get it. I’m sure most of them are driven by a bittersweet feeling that this is their last and only chance to experiences these places, because they probably won’t be back.

Well, I turned 47 last week, and goodness knows that I’m having that exact same feeling right now. When will I return to this village of Vietri Sul Mare again? Probably never. So I better do my best to experience it now. Even if I’m blessed with decades of leisure time in my life, the world is too big and fascinating to retrace my steps to anywhere except my most favorite and cherished places. Perhaps that’s just me being an overly ambitious American, obsessed with doing it all rather than doing it right. I don’t know. What I do know: a couple weeks ago in Rome, we met a couple from Santa Barbara, friends of a friend, and we shared a wonderful, lively chat with them over drinks. While we recounted our adventures over the past few months, they described how they had simply rented a place in Tuscany for a few weeks and hunkered down there, finding and revisiting their favorite restaurants in the town, getting to know the place, and really relaxing into it. Even as they openly admired our accomplishments, I couldn’t help but feel like they were doing a much better job at this travel thing than we were. That they were doing the trip that I had said I wanted to do—but wasn’t.

First world problems indeed. It must require every ounce of your empathy to feel bad for me and my tribulations right now—if you’re even trying! Suffice it to say that traveling slow and well is an elusive goal, and even after three months, we’re still having a hard time figuring it out. Let’s hope we do over the next few.

Second problem: apparently that global pandemic thing is finally sort of yesterday’s news. Everything is open again, COVID tests, vaccines, and masks are no longer required most places, and tourism has come roaring back, like probably nothing the world has even seen. We were already noticing it in Santa Barbara this spring. Now, people around the globe who deferred vacations for the past two summers are apparently taking them right now. A hell of a lot of them are here in Italy, but I’m certain they’re everywhere else too. I don’t blame them! How could I? But this crush of visitors is making our own travel planning quite a bit trickier than a few months ago. As we try to plot out some sojourns in Scotland and Ireland later this summer, we’re finding entire cities without a single Airbnb or hotel room that can accommodate us—or only very expensive ones. Cars too are hard to rent and expensive. Flights and ferries are all booked up. At least until September, we can no longer say that we’ll figure out something once we get somewhere—we have to reserve it now or risk being out of luck. It’s taken both Amy and I dozens of hours to finagle the next leg of our journey, sometimes juggling alternate routes and agonizing over just how over-budget we’re going to be. Traveling during COVID was difficult, but traveling after COVID has its own challenges!

Got that violin out yet? I didn’t think so.

Now for the last of my excuses: I’m just tired. Even under the best of circumstances, travel is exhausting, and I ain’t in my early twenties anymore. We move around every 3 to 5 days, and each time, the transition seems to consume at least half a day, as we pack up all of ours and Griffin’s belongings, clean up the place we’re staying, haul our years’ worth of luggage down streets, staircases and docks, navigate trains, buses, boats and taxis to get to our next destination, get settled into and learn the idiosyncrasies of our new place, and figure out mundane things like how to do laundry and buy groceries. I somehow forgot how formidable it was just buying food in a foreign country; each trip to a grocery store seems to take the better part of an hour, including considerable time reading labels with Google Translate and trying to work up the courage to ask—in very poor German, Slovenian, or Italian—if they have hummus or bar soap?

Meanwhile, a good night’s sleep has been rather elusive. Both Amy and I suffer from insomnia, but opposite sorts: she has trouble falling asleep, while I wake up too early. I had hoped that taking a year off to relax, away from the demands of work and home, would help. Not so much. Turns out that sleeping in a new bed in a new apartment in a new town every few days can be a bit challenging, especially when some of these Airbnbs are rather noisy or don’t have air conditioning—and Italy has been experiencing quite the heat wave these past few weeks. Laying on a sheet damp with your own sweat in a stuffy bedroom while the downstairs neighbors are throwing a rowdy dinner party until 1 in the morning? Not quite as restful as they made it sound in the brochure! How good I had it at home with our big soft bed, blackout curtains, and very quiet neighborhood.

And then there’s poor Griffin, whose only playmates for most of this trip have been us. It’s wonderful to spend so much time with my cheeky, curious, energetic son, and we try to figure out clever ways to get him interested in each new place we visit. (Nonetheless, he still sometimes gets confused about where we are. “Are we still in Europe?”, he sometimes asks!) But trying to keep him engaged every waking hour can be an exhausting task, especially since I’m on my own most evenings while Amy works and most mornings while she sleeps in. He and I take a lot of early walks to get cappuccinos and croissants—often just because we need something to do. And too often, I give up and just let him play games or watch YouTube videos on the tablet. Bad dad.

Every parent reading this right now—especially the ones with a job and more than one child—is surely sympathetic to my distressing plight of having to entertain just ONE CHILD with virtually no other obligations. Thanks for feeling my pain.

Don’t get me wrong: most of the time, we’re all having a blast. I mean, we’re on the trip of a lifetime here. Maybe several lifetimes. Who gets to do something like this, especially mid-life? It’s a ridiculous and amazing privilege, one I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve. But even as rewarding as it all is, it turns out that it’s also a bit of work, more than I thought it would be. I get why a lot of people prefer to hop on a cruise or go to an all-inclusive resort. Because that’s a relaxing vacation. This? This is a journey (albeit a really pleasurable one). Let’s just hope that this journey provides us not only with a lifetime of memories, but also makes us a stronger family, and sculpts the three of us into wiser and more curious, compassionate, and resilient humans.

Tired of all the introspection and kvetching? Me too! So let’s get back to the travelogue and photos. Next stop: glorious Venice!