The Pillars of Hercules

10 The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia

With fascists in the Italian government for the first time since the war, I was interested to see whether the trains would be running on time. But even in Christian Democratic times they had nearly always been punctual. Italians told me that in the era of Mussolini, who boasted of railway promptness, the trains were often late. These days Italian State Railways were so eager to please they printed Buon Viaggio in big blue letters on each square of toilet paper — under the circumstances creating a rather puzzling and ambiguous impression of farewell.

In the recent Italian election, the neofascists of the National Alliance Party had helped Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! party win a majority. The Minister of Transportation was the neofascist who had called Mussolini “the greatest statesman of the century.” Another party in Berlusconi’s coalition was the Northern League, which was pledged to regaining parts of Slovenia and Croatia and creating a Greater Italy once again. Rijeka in Croatia had once been the Italian city of Fiume. An Italian minister flew to Trieste and, directing his comments at Slovenia, screamed, “On your knees!”

It was so much like old times that I would not have been surprised to see a gesticulating politician call for another invasion of Ethiopia. I hated noticing politics, but this verged on surrealism and could not be ignored. It was the anticommunist element in Italian fascism, and the protection of the Vatican — in habitual collusion with Fascists — that allowed Klaus Barbie and other Nazis to be spirited to Bolivia. There “Klaus Altman” formed The Fiancés of Death, an underground organization for smuggling drugs and arms, and committing the occasional murder. After many years Barbie was caught and extradited to France, to the annoyance of the neofascists.

Having left Bari, I was in a noisy compartment, with a priest and several old women and some businessmen, on my way to Ancona via Foggia and San Benedetto del Tronto. It was such a crowded train these passengers had no choice but to join this priest and his evil eye in this compartment.

“If Jesus came on earth to save souls, huh, why didn’t he come sooner in world history?” a hectoring woman asked the elderly priest. “Eh? What about all the others before him, for all these thousands of years?”

“Good question,” the priest said.

Some other people were chattering about politics, so I asked about the neofascists. What did they actually stand for?

“I’m not sure,” one man said. He was middle-aged, tweedily dressed, possibly a lawyer, and was headed to Ancona. I addressed the question to him because he had the kindliest demeanor. “No one is sure. The neofascists say they have broken with the past.”

And yet I had the feeling they idolized Mussolini. After all, the party was formed by old-line fascists. But I hesitated to say this.

“What’s on their minds — race, imperialism, or immigration?”

“Probably all three. They also talk about the work ethic and crime and lazy people and wasted taxes.”

The man sitting beside him was blunter. He said, “They want a police state.”

Later on, a young man handed me a leaflet in a train station. The message on it was that the neofascists were intent on suppressing personal freedom, democracy, the press and to limit rights generally.

At Foggia, some people got off, two nuns got on. One with the meaty face and bulldog jowls of J. Edgar Hoover took a nip of brandy from beneath her robes and poured the whole thing into a glass of orange juice. She then glugged it down. Her black-robed companion, a dead ringer for the singer Meatloaf, quaffed a similar drink. It was 11:30 in the morning. They told the rest of the people in the compartment that it was the feast day of Santa Maria Antigua and with that they began saying the rosary very loudly in loud auctioneering voices for the next half hour. After the last Hail Mary the nun who looked like Meatloaf burst into tears. The other nun comforted her until she said, “I am all right now,” and changed her seat.

I was reading the Bari newspaper which had a story describing how Italy’s birthrate was the lowest in Europe. That was quite funny. The pope had recently denounced condoms as sinful.

The very fat woman who had joined in the nuns’ loud rosary took out a magazine and a sandwich. It was a health magazine called Sta Bene; the sandwich was mozzarella and ham. She read and munched all the way to Pescara.

Next to the railway line the calm and relatively shallow Adriatic gleamed, almost motionless, even at the shoreline, all the way through Abruzzi. And always the little ritual of the stationmasters at the smaller stations, the man in his crimson peaked cap, brandishing his wand, blowing his whistle, finally saluting as the train clanked away, all the couplings ringing like hammered anvils. I saw fat sheep and grapevines and olive trees. There were backyards, too, some of them with miserable-looking people in them. I remembered how, for years in London, riding the train home, I felt a sense of personal failure riding past the backyards of Clapham and Wandsworth. There was a point to be made about the way the trains in the Mediterranean traversed the rear of so many houses, and their melancholy backyards. It was so revealing, if you could stand it.

Leaning against the window, in the corridor of the train, looking at the road that ran beside the tracks, I heard two young men beside me talking. They were noticing the more expensive cars. A large red motorcycle, a man and his woman passenger, swung out from behind a car and passed it, the shapely woman hugging and holding on.

“What a bike,” the first boy said. Che moto.

“What an ass,” the second boy said. Che culo.

I got off at San Benedetto del Tronto, where at the Center for Aqua-culture and Mariculture at the University of Camerino I looked for someone to talk to about the condition of the Mediterranean. San Benedetto advertised itself as a holiday destination — the coast was crammed with hotels and beaches — but I was interested in water quality and fish farms.

“Yes, we have fish farms,” said Dr. Gennari Laurent, who was half French and half Italian. He said he was glad to see me. There was not a lot of public interest in fish farms. “We are growing sea bass and bream.”

He was talking about small numbers — three hundred thousand fry compared to 200 million grown in the rest of Europe. But it took three years for a fish to grow to maturity in northern waters, two years in the south.

“We are mainly a research establishment. Still, we eat them.”

“Do you put them into the Mediterranean?”

“It is very difficult to introduce fish into the sea,” Dr. Laurent said. “Take a fry that has been fed on dry pellets. You can’t fatten him and put him into the sea, especially a sea bass. They have a particular way of feeding. A bream might possible adapt. But that’s not our purpose. We are studying a whole new area of fish farming.”

“For commercial purposes?”

“Eventually,” he said. “Greece has hundreds of fish farms — bass and bream. France raises trout. The British grow salmon. Italy is way ahead in eels — for eating, of course.”

The decline in the eel population was a good indication of how bad pollution had become, he said. The European glass eel was once found all over the Adriatic, and was caught in great numbers around Venice; but now the eel did not travel more northerly than Ancona, because of the vile water.

“The Yugoslavia side of the Adriatic is deeper, so there are more fish,” he said. “One of the problems on the Italian coast is river pollution. The Po is very bad. I studied it myself. I found very bad water quality in the delta areas. Metals. Nitrates. Copper, for example. In fish it is immunodepressive — it breaks down the fish’s immune system, so they get diseases.”

“I was under the impression that fish farms created pollution from all their accumulated excrement.”

“Yes, that happens. The laws are lax here but strict in, say, Holland. But it is possible to reduce the level of ammonia through certain diets, or by using filtration.”

“Do you think that someday there will be no fishermen in the Mediterranean, just fish farms?” I asked.

“There will always be some fishermen here,” he said. “During two months in spring there is a ban on trawling, but after that everyone fishes twice as hard. It’s hopeless!”

By the time I left the university and reclaimed my bag at the station it was dark and so I spent the night in San Benedetto, a tourist town with no tourists yet. I caught an early train to the good-sized city of Ancona. This was also a large harbor and ferry port, with ships to Greece and Croatia. The district at the end of the railway line in Ancona was called Pinocchio. “As for Ancona,” James Joyce wrote at the turn of the century, “I cannot think about it without repugnance. There is something Irish in its bleak gaunt beggarly ugliness.” Some of that bleakness is apparent today, but it is softened by the friendly and apparently prosperous people of Ancona, whose luck it is to live on one of the great harbors of the Adriatic.

As soon as I found a hotel I went for a walk to the harbor. A fisherman at the port, Signor Impiccini, said that his catches were miserable. I told him I liked the fish they called triglia.

“They are best when they are small,” he said. “Over eight or nine inches they don’t taste nice.”

“Are they found outside the Adriatic?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “The bottom of the Adriatic is sandy and muddy because of the rivers that empty into it. Triglia from the Adriatic are best in soup or baked. But the Tyrrhenian Sea has a rocky bottom. Triglia from that rocky bottom are best grilled.”

As I walked along the harbor I saw a gathering of men, three men apologizing and explaining something to an older man, who was complaining. Then, having finished explaining, the men told him how much they liked him, and when the first one finished, he goosed him by driving a finger into the man’s buttocks. The startled man jumped in anger. The second man did the same — a declaration of friendship and then a goose. The third man took a handful of the man’s ass and twisted it, all the while talking in mock sincerity. Finally, they walked away from the man, laughing in triumph, and muttering “He can shove it” (Va fan cul) and “Unnerstan?” (Eh gabeet?) and “To hell with it!” (Mannaggia la miseria!)

Few words are more vulgar than “ass” in Italy, and “shove it” sounds very coarse in Italian. Nevertheless, it was a fairly common refrain. I thought of the young men on the train (“What a bike” … “What an ass”) and how, ever since Sicily, whenever I bought a morning paper I was struck by the pornography on newsstands, not the fact of it — because of course it was everywhere, as common as postcards and devotional literature — but the kind of pornography; its themes and emphasis. There were videotapes and picture magazines. Most of it was prominently advertised as sodomy.

“Top Anal” and “Sex School (100 % Anal)” were displayed along with the “Donald Duck” comics and the Sacred Heart prayer cards. “Capriccio Anale” was stacked next to Italian-English dictionaries, and The Sights of Ancona—or wherever. Some of it was euphemistic: “A View from Behind.” Much of it was blunt: “The Seeker of a Deep Ass.” Often these combined women and animals, dogs mostly, in such videos or magazines as “Moscow Dog,” “Three Women and a Dog,” “Animal Instincts (Anal),” “Super Animal,” and so forth, displayed for anyone buying a newspaper to inspect. In Italy pornography was as publicly proclaimed, and as inescapable, as religion.

In Spain I had reached the conclusion that a country’s pornography reveals an inner state and gives clues to a society’s unconscious: its predilections and compulsions. What sells as pornography in one country would be laughed at in another. I happened to be in Ancona, but Italian pornography was pretty much the same all over the country. There were also unambiguous advertisements in Italy, such as the lovely woman appearing to fellate a penis-shaped fudgicle (motto: “Me and my Magnum!”). But what did this Italian obsession with sodomy and bestiality indicate? It was not a delicate subject but it was a delicate question.

I risked asking it in Ancona, in a bar the night that I arrived. I was among students — Ancona seemed to be full of schools and colleges. One was reading a thick book, Il Fenomeno Burocratico. On the little piece of paper she was using as a bookmark were scribbled the words “Chi si considera — vale poco; chi si confronta — vale molto.” I fell into conversation with some of them, who were talking about the war in Bosnia, and after I said that I was an American they practiced their English with me. Eventually they got around to asking me what I thought of Italy.

“The food is wonderful, and I am grateful for the hospitality,” I said. “People are also gentle with children, open-minded and appreciative. The newspapers are lively, the bookstores are excellent. Most of all Italians are pleasant to be with because they are pleasant to each other.”

I went on in this way, meaning what I said, and then, choosing my words carefully, I asked about the emphasis on sodomy in the porno I had been noticing.

“That’s an old Italian method of birth control,” one boy said, and they all laughed.

On my way to Rimini the next day I passed the seaside towns of Senigallia and Fano, the beginning of what Italians call “The German Coast,” La Costa Tedesca, because of the annual visitation of Germans in the hundreds of thousands, from May until September. There were German trailer parks at Marotta, and signs in German on most beaches. The train passed so near the sea I could clearly hear the sluggish Adriatic slosh against the jetties and the breakwaters that ran parallel to the shore. It was as heavily developed and as tacky as the Spanish coast, but unlike Spain far lusher inland: hills of black pines, meadows bounded by junipers and poplars, modest vineyards and orchards, fields of hay being cut and baled.

The look of tragic absurdity in a resort out of season was epitomized by Rimini, so hopeful, so ready, so empty. No town in Italy, except Rome, is so Fellini-esque. Rimini was where the great director was born and grew up; it was deeply a part of his mind, it fueled his imagination, it was the scene of a number of his movies. Rimini, an ancient town that was also a cheap seaside resort, a blend of classical ruins and carnival entertainments, was a perfect image for Italy, too. No wonder Fellini returned to it again and again to evoke his wildest imagery. (A vast fat woman dancing on Rimini’s beach and chanting, “Shame! Shame!” to a little boy.) The town is justifiably proud of Fellini. After he died a pretty park near the seafront was named after him.

A faintly seedy place, Rimini is another resort that is noted for its throngs of German tourists. Yet some of the town is elegant, with boulevards of substantial villas, and the older part of town is ancient and lovely. There is a Roman amphitheater, a cathedral, several handsome churches. The local cuisine is also delicious. The area is well-known for its whitebait and clam sauce and fizzy wines. I tried everything, but still felt somewhat uncomfortable. The problem is Rimini’s small size. It was true of other towns on this coast. They were simply not built for this many people. The market overflowed the piazzas and streets and alleys, and on Saturdays there was no old town, simply stall after stall selling fruit and vegetables, cheese and meat, and stacks of clothes, as well as pots and pans, t-shirts, sweaters, and all sorts of Chinese knock-offs of U.S. merchandise that are now sold the world over.

As the sun sank and the lights began to wink Rimini became Fellini-esque — something about the lights twinkling in the emptiness, under the moonless sky, the wind whipping at the seaside pennants and making the awnings flap. There were little chairs and empty pavilions, and the avenue along the shore was scoured by the wind hurrying off the sea, out of the Adriatic darkness, making Rimini seem like an abandoned carnival in the wilderness: small, weak, painted, futile, doomed. As Catholics said, and as Fellini insisted, the town was an occasion of sin.

I hiked up and down the seafront, liking the strangeness of all the hotels and cafes and lights, self-mocking in their abandonment. The beach was completely divided into horrible little fenced-off areas, the very sand taken over and planted with tables, chairs, beach toys, changing rooms, playgrounds — everything evenly spaced, right out to the tide-mark, with signs and flags. But it was empty on this low season night. I came to a better part of town, the Viale Principe Amedeo, with its villas side by side, the Villa del Angelo, Villa Mauro, Villa Jacinta, all looking wonderful and solid, family houses for the summer, the very image of bourgeois smugness, with palms and walled gardens.

And there this cold night, among the walls and the evergreens, on that street and the side streets, were numerous prostitutes, hailing the few passing cars, caught in the headlights’ sudden gleam like deer dazzled in the road. Their long coats were flung apart by their urgent strutting — they wore cycling shorts and miniskirts and lingerie under these coats. They were big women — tall, not fat but imposing. Some were as big as men, and might well have been men — male transvestites. Seeing me they became animated, and called out, and sang, Eh, baybee! I larf you!

“Good evening,” I said.

“You want something nice?” this laughing woman said.

“I just want to know how you are doing.”

Another big one lunged at me and grabbed my crotch and said, “I want this!”

They all laughed at me, so bored and frustrated were they on a chilly night with no cars. There were more of them farther on, standing on the street, lurking in the driveways, in black slacks and blue suits. Some were Africans, a few might have been Germans or Slovenians, Bosnian refugees, recently liberated Albanians. Apart from me, they were the only pedestrians, and yet they were not walking, but rather actively standing, posturing, hallooing, waiting to be picked up by cars that went by. And after a while a few cars did go by, very slowly, the drivers appraising the women.

Fellini would have loved it: the bourgeois neighborhood, the expensive cars, the windy nights, the whores scattered among the villas, the shrieks and catcalls.

Seven or eight young boys went down the street and began teasing them, but the prostitutes stood their ground, jeering at the boys, questioning their virility.

“You’ve got nothing down there, boy!”

In the Via Gambalunga, also on a “nice” street (dentists’ offices, villas, apartment houses), there was the “Club Riche Monde — Cabaret” and in small print No one under 21 Admitted and Porno Show. This also seemed Fellini-esque — degradation in a respectable neighborhood. As a younger man, ravenous for experience, I would have gone in. But it was after midnight, and I knew what was inside: expensive drinks and exhibitionism, and the kind of shakedown that makes you ashamed of how predictable the libido is. That, and the feeling of unease I got in the presence of public sex, like the irritation I felt when I saw comic books and porno mags all jumbled together on the newsstand. I went back to my hotel and read a book. Nowadays I did not want to put myself in the hands of pimps.

Another Fellini episode occurred the next day in Rimini. I was walking along one of the main streets and a bus lurched to a halt, and the passengers began banging on the windows. The driver had barricaded them in by locking the exit door, and a crowd gathered around the bus to watch the passengers arguing and struggling to get out. The police were summoned, and so were the ticket collectors from a nearby bus stop. There was fury inside the bus.

Ten African girls were gesticulating and howling in Italian. Then the doors opened and some old women got out. The African girls were still yelling at the driver. The police questioned them. “Where’s your ticket?” “Don’t touch me!” “We’re all together!”

An Italian dwarf in a silk suit, smoking reflectively, stood near me to watch.

“What’s up?”

“Tickets,” he said.

The crowd grew around the bus, and now the African girls were screaming. They were Somalis or Sudanese or Eritreans, from the old Italian colonies and mission stations. It was hard to tell where they came from because they were so thoroughly urbanized, each one in an expensive wig and tight pants and heavy makeup — purple lips, glittering mascara. It was a showdown, and it went on for about twenty minutes, but at the end the girls were triumphant, and they screamed abuse at the spectators and waved their bus tickets and swore at the driver. The police shrugged. The bus drove off.

Not all encounters between Africans and Italians are so jolly. The Violence Observatory, a Rome-based organization that monitors such incidents, reported that an average of at least one attack a day on foreigners was recorded in 1993, and the figures were higher in 1994. These were stabbings, shootings, beatings. All it took to provoke such an attack was a single episode — say a carload of Moroccans running down an Italian girl (as happened the same month at the Tyrrhenian resort of Torvavianca) — and local people began assaulting any darkish foreigner they encountered. A few months after I saw this odd encounter in Rimini a fire destroyed a barracks housing hundreds of farmworkers in Villa Literno near Naples. The victims were mostly Africans, who are now Italy’s tomato-pickers.

A satirist like Fellini, merciless and impartial, would have had something to say. And I began to think once again that the great justification for traveling the shore of the Mediterranean, if such a justification was necessary, was that the foreground — these sudden strange encounters — was much more interesting than the Roman amphitheaters and the ruins.

• • •

From Rimini I took a branch line train inland to Ferrara, via Cérvia and Lido di Savio, detouring around the enormous low-lying delta of the Po. The train stopped everywhere, picking up old people and noisy schoolchildren in this tucked-away part of Italy, all farming communities, crammed with fig trees and vineyards and fields tangled with artichokes.

I stopped in Ferrara and took a taxi to the nearby village — so it seemed from the map; it was called Dodici Morelli, it was just a crossroads, some houses, a thicket of hedges, a small church.

“There is not much here,” the taxi driver said.

“My grandfather was born here,” I said. “My mother’s father.”

“Bravo,” the man said. “He did the right thing — went to America!”

“He used to write poetry,” I said.

“Bravo.” He said it with feeling.

It was a short trip by train from Ferrara to the little station at Rovigo. On the way a Portuguese couple in my compartment quarreled with the conductor. The woman had injured her arm, she said. The conductor doubted her. He asked her to fill out a declaration. The woman did not speak Italian. I gathered that she was drunk.

“Why you write I push de doors? I no push de doors! Geeve me, you dunno!”

“In Venice you go to police.”

“Why? No! I no go! I escape from theese man!”

I stepped from that screaming into the green fields of Rovigo and caught another branch-line train, even smaller, the spur to Chioggia by way of the tiniest Italian villages I had seen so far, the farms and settlements that feed the appetites of Venice. It was a happy discovery: in the midst of all the celebrated cities, this obscure corner, reachable on a little rattling two-car train. The land was as flat as Holland, it had the look of a floodplain, and garlic and onions and lettuce sprouted from it.

At the end of this branch-line railway was the small ancient seaside town of Chioggia, the last, most southerly island in the chain of narrow barrier islands that form the eastern edge of the lagoon of Venice. The lovely city hovers in the distance like a mirage on water, dreamlike spires and domes in the mist.

• • •

Chioggia is Venice with motor traffic. As a consequence it is scruffy and noisy, not livelier but more chaotic — few tourists, lots of locals, only dogs and children in the backstreets, and only one hotel that I could see. I was not planning to stay. I had arrived early enough in the day to look around and then leave. With no splendid image to live up to, a rather ordinary town on the water, Chioggia was restful and pleasant. There were concerts and events advertised, but it was obvious that Chioggia had constantly to defend itself against the taunts of people who compared it unfavorably with Venice.

I left my bag with the ferry captain of the Clodia at the main quay and then walked from one end of town to the other, and across bridges and along the small canals. After lunch, I followed a nervous and exhausted bride and groom who were having their pictures taken; the family trailed behind, with gently mocking friends, and onlookers, and all the while the bride’s white gown and long train dragged through the mud of the quay.

I bought an antique postcard with a 1935 postmark in Chioggia, not for the picture — of Trieste — but the message: “You are always in my thoughts. Infinite kisses.” (Sei sempre nei mei pensieri. Baci infiniti.) Such tender sentiments lifted my spirits.

Workers from Chioggia commuted to the Lido on the Clodia. Anything but an easy trip, it was cheap but exhausting, over an hour and a half, involving ferries, buses, and in places legging it. The whole affair of transfer had the laborious efficiency of Italian travel. The ferry crossed to Pellestrina Island, where at the quay a bus was waiting to transport the ferry passengers to the north end of the Pellestrina. This island of somewhat recent, somewhat ugly houses and green meadows, and football fields, and schools, could have been almost anywhere in coastal Italy, except that the lagoon to the left and the seawall to the right were reminders that it was unusually slender and low-lying. The soil was sodden and waterlogged, with that unnatural reclaimed look that Holland has, hardly land it seems so fragile and false, more like a raft or a carpet, not terra firma but something more easily drowned.

Arriving at the village of Santa Maria del Mare, the bus rolled straight onto another ferry, the Ammiana, which had been waiting there at the north end of Pellestrina. This new ferry, with the bus on board, plowed into the lagoon and took us a half mile to the south end of the Lido, another long and narrow island. The bus drove off the ferry ramp, with us on it, and after a while we arrived at the Lido water taxi station.

The Lido was residential; it is for people who want tree-lined streets, and cars, and the chance to swim. As a barrier island, on the sea, it acts as Venice’s shoreline; the word lido means “shore.” Several hotels of the Lido are extravagantly grand, on their own Adriatic beaches; there are also many small hotels, and the usual boardinghouses. Today a rough sea was battering the beach of the elegant Hotel des Bains, where Von Aschenbach leered at lovely little Tadzio, and contemplated the meaning of life, in Death in Venice, the ultimate low season narrative. Perhaps the masterpiece would have been more aptly titled Death on the Lido, since the Lido bears no resemblance at all to Venice.

I considered staying at the Hotel des Bains or the Excelsior, but thought better of it. Apart from the fact that rooms were too expensive, I also felt that I would be isolated from the life of the Lido, in a gilded cage. Sometime in the future, when all I had to do was read a book, and not write one, I would return and stay there. It seemed to me that the greatest Mediterranean comforts were available at those grand hotels on the Lido, but at a price, about $600 a night. On the lagoon side of the island, I found the sort of ordinary hotel that in Italy was usually clean and pleasant, and the next morning I realized I had chosen well.

The first thing I saw the following day, as I walked down my side street to the lagoon, was a great flotilla of boats. Decked with pennants and banners, they were high-sterned wooden watercraft, larger and more elaborate than gondolas, with gold trim and bright paint, the lead boat with a tall crucifix instead of a mast and others carrying statues of saints, all of them manned by crews of oarsmen who were rowing them across the lagoon from Venice to the Lido. They bobbed busily in the early-morning sunshine.

I had arrived at a good time, the Feast of the Ascension (the Festa della ’Sensa in Venetian slang), the day of the annual ceremony of marriage with the sea, Ceremonia dello Sposalizio del Mare. In former times, the Doge threw his ring into the lagoon and a young fisherman dived into the water and grabbed it. These days it was a regatta, followed by a mass at the Chiesa San Nicolo al Lido (“Here the Emperor Barbarossa stayed before his meeting with Pope Alexander III in San Marco in 1177”—but perhaps we knew that already).

The ceremony was a ritualized blessing, the pretty boats with their bunting and flags and ribbons all fluttering in the wind, drawn alongside the embankment; the muscular oarsmen still panting from the effort of the long row, their eyes lowered, standing in their splashed costumes, their caps doffed. A mass followed this, just like the sort of happy mass that followed a wedding ceremony. I associated this amount of piety and time with the sort of weddings I had preferred in my days as an altar boy: there was usually a tip afterward from the harassed father of the bride. Tips and tokens were passing to the oarsmen who were like acolytes at this ceremony. The so-called marriage of the sea “commemorated the Conquest of Dalmatia in A.D. 1000,” my guidebook said: oars and pennants and blessings on this shore for almost a thousand years.

I took a water-bus from the Lido to Venice proper, and approaching this city in the sea, glittering in brilliant sunshine, I began to goggle, trembling a little, feeling a physical thrill and unease, in the presence of such beauty, an exaltation amounting almost to fear.

Venice is magic, the loveliest city in the world, because it has entirely displaced its islands with palaces and villas and churches. It is man-made, but a work of genius, sparkling in its own lagoon, floating on its dreamy reflection, with the shapeliest bridges and the last perfect skyline on earth: just domes and spires and tiled roofs. It is one color, the mellowest stone. There is no sign of land, no earth at all, only water traffic and canals. Everyone knows this, and yet no one is prepared for it, and so the enchantment is overwhelming. The fear you feel is the fear of being bewitched and helpless. Its visitors gape at it, speechless with admiration, hardly believing such splendor can shine forth from such slimy stones.

Language cannot do justice to Venice and nothing can detract from its beauty. It floods regularly; its marble is damaged and decayed, its paintings rot, it has stinking corners. Its canals are green, some of it looks poisonous, it is littered, it teems with rats which not even the masses of Venetian cats can cope with. The graffiti on ancient walls and on church pillars — I noted Berlusconi is Doing Harm and Berlusconi is the Assassin of Democracy—is almost incidental. People still live in Venice, children play in its backstreets, where families turn the cranks of pasta machines, men congregate to smoke, women scorch tomatoes. In the alleys beggar women cradle their children and hold signs: Please Help My Family — Ex-Yugoslavia. Even the fact that Venice is actually sinking, and might one day be destroyed if not disappear altogether, gives it an air of fragility and drama, a passionate mortality.

The outdoor pleasures of Venice — walking, traveling on the water-buses, gloating over the architecture — are as intense as the indoor pleasures of browsing among the masterpieces of painting and sculpture. Both are hopeless too, because there is not enough time to see everything you want. To use my time, because I was just passing through, I made a project for myself. I looked for paintings in churches and galleries where the sea was specifically shown — the sea battles, the blessing of fleets, the sight of canals and gondolas in the background of religious pictures, the mythology of the sea. The best by far was in the Ducal Palace in St. Mark’s, Tiepolo’s “Venice receiving the Homage of Neptune”—the lovely woman personifying the city, La Serenissima, reclining while the ancient grizzled god empties a great hornlike shell of its treasure of gold coins and jewels.

At the western edge of Venice, towards the quays where the largest ships are moored, and next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, is a large medieval and mournful-looking prison. Being in prison in Venice seemed to me like the classical definition of Hell — that you are near Heaven but denied it absolutely.

That was also how I felt when I had to leave Venice, on a crowded train to Trieste.

All the way to Trieste I caught little glimpses of the sea, and after the train climbed to Aurisina in the hills that funneled the famous Bora wind into the city, I had a panoramic view of the enormous notch in the Adriatic, called the Gulf of Venice on the map. It was the last gasp of Italy — you could almost spit into Slovenia from a window on the left side of this train.

The late-afternoon sun, misshapen by the risen dust, lost its lightness and its gold, and thickening, growing orange as it descended, began to break slowly, the white sea dissolving the sun’s rich pulp.

With a little shudder the train, with far fewer passengers, stopped at Trieste’s South Station. I walked out and sensed that I was no longer in Italy. It hardly looked like the Mediterranean anymore.

Trieste was once the noble port of Austria, and it still looked to me like Vienna-by-the-Sea. The city still had those gray Hapsburg buildings, every one of them looking like the headquarters of an insurance company (and that included the Church of St. Anthony the Thaumaturgist), sloping up from the port, in austere and forbidding terraces. The structures of Trieste have big flat faces. It is a city of apartments and suites, not private houses, nor any small stucco dwellings on backstreets. No chickens, hardly any cats; all the dogs on leashes, like its sister cities in northern Europe, composed of seriousness and gloom and the fragrance of sticky pastries. It is the city closely documented in the novels of Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, the ultimate account of a man trying to give up smoking, and Senility, the story of an infatuation. Svevo’s friend James Joyce urged Svevo to call the latter book As a Man Grows Older.

Joyce lived in Trieste off and on for about seven years, and wrote most of Ulysses there, gave English lessons, fell in love with one of his students. Sir Richard Burton, one of the world’s greatest travelers, was British Consul here in Trieste towards the end of his career, and while his wife Isabel worried about the welfare of Trieste’s stray cats and overworked donkeys, Burton had worked on his books. They also spent time up the line at Villa Opicina. The Burtons liked Trieste so well they eventually colonized seventeen rooms in one of these large apartment blocks. Sir Richard filled it with his spears and his dueling swords and collections of pornography and incunabula; he wrote a dozen books, including his translation of The Arabian Nights; and here in Trieste he died.

It was just a few hours by train from the incandescent lightness of Venice to the lugubrious gray of Trieste, but of course being in the Mediterranean was all about surprising transitions. Indeed, ever since arriving on the Adriatic shore I had been anxious about my next move, the onward journey to Croatia. I had seen the ferries leaving for Split from Bari and Ancona. “No service to Dubrovnik,” I was told. None to Montenegro. I guessed the reasons why. The thought of going there preoccupied me; I knew a bit about it, just enough of the atrocities of its war and its recent devastation so that images of it invaded my dreams. Trieste was safe, but Trieste was a more serious place than any I had seen, and it seemed to be preparing me for something grimmer.

Just at dusk the city was almost empty of pedestrians. I walked the length of the port and then back on the inside streets, and found a place to stay.

“So what brings you to Trieste?” the clerk asked.

“I was curious about it,” I said, and thinking of the writer who had made the city real to me, I added, “And I have read Svevo. In English, though.”

“It is better to read Svevo in English. He’s too confusing in Italian.”

Italians were full of compliments, even here at the edge of Slovenia. The Spanish were too restrained to praise, the French too envious and uncertain, the Corsicans too proud. For the more generous and extrovert Italians, praise was normal, words cost nothing, so the flow of daily life was eased. I had lost an important ticket in Venice. At first the ticket collector mildly scolded me by clucking, but when I said, “I am a cretin — I am really stupid,” he said, “No, no — it is usual to lose a ticket, don’t be hard on yourself.”

More urgently than I intended I said to the hotel clerk, “I want to go to Croatia. Do you know anything about traveling there?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But sometimes we get the refugees.”

I saw some the next day — panhandlers holding politely worded signs, and disoriented families with bags and boxes idling at the port. After the Venetian capriccio, this sobriety. The Triestini themselves were taller than Italians I had been seeing, and paler, and rather laconic. It was a city of suits, a businesslike place with an air of solidity and prosperity.

James Joyce had been that most enigmatic of refugees, a literary exile in Trieste, sitting out the First World War in a Triestine apartment and writing his masterpiece about Dublin. But he had come there earlier. From 1904 to 1906, fleeing Ireland, practicing “silence, exile, cunning,” he was an English teacher in Trieste’s Berlitz School, while writing short stories. After a brief absence he returned to Trieste in 1907 and gave private English lessons. One of his students, Hector Schmitz, was middle-aged (Joyce was a highly excitable twenty-five-year-old) and a businessman, yet when Joyce showed him an early draft of his short story “The Dead,” his student brought out two novels he had written under his pen name. He told Joyce that they were old hat — he had published Una Vita, twelve years before, and Senilitá in 1898. The young Irishman declared him a neglected genius. Senilitá especially pleased him.

It is easy to see why. The novel is about desire as self-deceiving, and it is firmly located in a city. The style is remorselessly plain, and every phase of the main character’s infatuation is described. Emilio is a writer made susceptible by literary vanity, and obsessed by Angiolina, who both teases him and grants him the occasional sexual favor. Angiolina is a tricky and lovely young woman, who obviously has other lovers. The humiliations of passion in a labyrinthine city fascinated Joyce — both Schmitz and his hero were to become aspects of Joyce’s henpecked hero, Leopold Bloom; and Schmitz’s meticulous documentation of Trieste must have impressed the Irish writer, who was to fill Ulysses with the actual streets and pubs and theaters of Dublin.

Looking for Svevo’s Trieste I realized how much a knowledge of the city mattered to an understanding of the novel. The city is Emilio’s world. The love affair is enacted throughout the city. They meet in the center of town, on the Corso. Later, “They always met in the open air.” Emilio woos Angiolina on the suburban roads, all of them named, and then they keep to the edge of the city, the Strada d’Opicina and the Campo Marzio.

I went to the Campo Marzio in the southwest corner of Trieste, where Emilio “saw the Arsenal stretching along the shore … ‘The city of labor!’ he said, surprised at himself for having chosen that place in which to make love to her.” Some pages later Emilio is shadowing Angiolina on the opposite side of town. I went there too, to the Public Gardens and across to the Via Fabio Severo and down the Via Romagna. I climbed to the Castle and walked down the hill to the Piazza Barriera Vecchia and had a coffee and pastry on the Corso again, delighted to be able to guide myself through the city by using a novel that was almost a hundred years old.

There were no tourists in Trieste that I could see. That was a conspicuous absence, because Venice was so frenzied with them. But why would tourists come here? True, there was a Roman amphitheater in town, yet another, behind the Corso, and a broken Roman arch — the gate of the old city — but that was so ruinous and disregarded it simply stuck out of a seedy building in a backstreet, at the edge of a building site, and was somewhat in the way. Later I found out that it was the Arco di Riccardo, named after Richard the Lionhearted, who was imprisoned here on his return from the Crusades. There was no sign on the arch, only a recently scribbled exclamation: Fuck the Fascists Forever!

At about just the point I had decided that Trieste was the quietest, most law-abiding place I had seen so far, I witnessed a vicious nighttime street fight.

It was my second night in the city. I was walking through the lamplit Piazza Italia, having just eaten another good meal (and also thinking of the rationing in Croatia). I heard screams — a young woman howling; then men shouting, and loud bangs. It was outside a restaurant, the strange halting peristalsis of men nerving themselves to fight, like apes displaying anger. There were about eight or nine men, ill-assorted, first thumping on tables, then engaging in noisy sorties, drawing back and becoming more abusive with distance, then throwing the tables, a few chairs too. These were the economies of battle, just clatter and threats, a form of restraint; and all the while the young woman screeching. But at last there was no going back, and the men went at each other, kicking and punching, the wildest scene I had witnessed since leaving Gibraltar. It was the last thing I expected in Trieste.

That was an exception. It was a solemn and even dull place, but with the most attractive women I had seen so far, taller, more angular, brisker and better dressed than elsewhere, not the duck-butted women of the Marches. Trieste’s food was not highly flavored, but it was hearty, mussels and spaghetti, fruit and fish, and the fine wines of its region, Friuli. I began to understand why Joyce had decided to live here and engage in the stimulating monotony of writing a novel.

Leaving Trieste meant leaving Italy, where knowing the language with reasonable fluency I had been happy — well-treated and well-fed. Now I was boarding the train into the unknown — the new nation of Slovenia and its neighbor, the crumbling republic of Croatia.