The subreddit r/LiminalSpace† invites users to post photographs of indeterminate, transitional places, but – as in many of the internet’s virtual locations – not before reading a set of rules. These set out a definition of liminality which submissions should capture (“It is YOUR responsibility to understand this concept before you post here”): “a transitional point between two regions or states”, such as uses, stages in life, or times of day that evoke “a state of limbo”. Popular subjects of successful submissions include shopping malls, hotels, corridors, and airports. There’s apparently something resonant about the atmosphere captured in these places: the subreddit has 512,000 members, while a bot reposts it to 1.2 million Twitter followers. The word “liminal” is an increasingly popular search term, and it has been creeping into critical writing, book blurbs and, one can only imagine, university essays. 

It’s a word you might want to reach for in Trieste. In the northeasternmost corner of Italy, at the hinge of land between the Adriatic Sea and Slovenia, with Austria close above and Croatia only 12 or so kilometres below, Trieste is a place between. Arrive from the west and you come through Friuli, passing fields of corn and grapevines, steelworks, roadside bars and the boatyards at Monfalcone. When you step out of the station in Trieste and cross the piazza, you pass the disused concert hall Sala Tipcovich, a pink concrete oblong with a stern trompe l’oeil curtain painted on its facade – the first of many buildings seemingly from a city much further east than you thought you were. Follow the road round the shoreline and the vast buildings facing out to sea are similarly not quite Italian: balconies frillier, statuettes hatted in Germanic feathered caps, road names shorter on vowels and heavier with fricatives. In your hotel room, you’ll find a pod of Illy coffee beside a little pot of UHT Austrian cream. Along the water, and in among the buildings and piazzas, there’s a prevailing sense of space – grand, placid, austere, inscrutable – the city proceeding like a sequence of Mitteleuropean paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, that big dog of liminality, with his titles like The Nostalgia of the Infinite and The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon.‡

The city’s history is one of transition and encounter, enigma and arrival. The Gulf of Trieste has been inhabited since at least 2000 BCE, its name recorded as Tergeste – probably from the Venetian “terg”, meaning market – by Julius Caesar in 51 BCE. It was an important port for the Roman Empire, and after the Empire’s fall it continued succeeding to the point of agitating an attack from Venice in the 1300s. In 1381, the citizens of Trieste petitioned Leopold III to eject the Venetians and bring the city into the Habsburg Empire. Disagreements with Venice continued, but by the 1700s Trieste was sure in its position as a vital port for the Empire, becoming a free port, which guaranteed the religious and economic liberty that lastingly defined its diverse social and infrastructural make-up. 

As the cause of Italian unification gathered steam in the 19th century, unionists set their eyes on Trieste, and after the First World War, the city was integrated into Italy, among the last regions to join the new country. In the fading Habsburg Empire, Trieste had been a vital port, but as part of Italy it was not wildly useful compared to places such as Genoa, Livorno, Naples and Venice along the country’s 7,500 kilometres of coastline. So Trieste’s ports, markets, insurance firms and drydocks dwindled, and its value became symbolic rather than practical: the easternmost edge of Italian territory and, for the nascent fascist movement, a reclaimed Roman settlement. When Italy switched to join the Allied forces toward the end of the Second World War, Trieste was swiftly occupied by Nazi forces, who found renewed use for it as a war-time port. In the aftermath of the war, it lingered under British-American rule before becoming an independent city state in 1947. Most of this city state finally rejoined Italy in 1954, but the border with Yugoslavia was only finally ratified as late as 1975.

Trieste is often associated with the exiles, emigrants and wanderers that this history has washed through it. If one wave was brought by its time as imperial hub – a young Sigmund Freud was sent by the Austrian government to work on the portentous job of ascertaining the location of the sex organs of eels – another wave has been attracted by the perpetual nostalgia and occasional eeriness of its present state. James Joyce straddled both eras. He arrived first in 1904 with his partner Nora Barnacle in tow, planning to teach English at the Berlitz school. He lived on and off in Trieste until 1920, with Nora, their children Giorgio and Lucia and a shifting line-up of family members he persuaded to join him. It was in Trieste that Joyce wrote Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the first parts of Ulysses. Here he met Italo Svevo, who would become a close friend and a writer he greatly admired. Both Joyce and Svevo, along with Umberto Saba, are represented amiably strolling in statues across the city. Joyce’s legacy is celebrated by a walking tour and a museum, while tourist brochures anxiously quote the reference to Trieste in Finnegan’s Wake – hard to spin into a catchy slogan – “And trieste, ah trieste ate I my liver!” (Some scholars hear in this the French “Triste était mon livre”, “Sad was my book”; there’s presumably something about drinking there, too.) Joyce made his final visit to Trieste in 1920, when the city was newly classified as Italian, and was disenchanted by its transformation into a place he no longer recognised. He took Nora, Giorgio, Lucia and Ulysses with him to Paris. 

“Ports are more vulnerable than most cities to vagaries of history,” writes Jan Morris in her book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Morris, a historian and travel writer, was entranced by the suspended identity of Trieste, by the melancholy she found suffusing its lost or unrealised purposes. She also lived through its transitional histories: as a young soldier (then presenting as a man), Morris was stationed in Trieste at the end of the Second World War, and she returned throughout her life, finally writing Trieste in 2001 as an elegy for the city, her idea of it and in some sense to herself. (It was meant to be her last book but, militarily industrious, she published eight more before her death in 2020.) 

Morris’ book is a useful tool for getting some purchase on the slippery liminality of Trieste and the notion of liminality itself. Its account of the city is historically rich, as well as being openly guided by biases of personal interest and sentiment, in particular a nostalgic reflection on Morris’ vexed lifelong relationship with the ideals of empire. For Morris, Trieste is frozen in the pure aspiration of empire, one she sees as cutting across petty nationalisms in the cause of a grand, border-crossing kindness. In its state of defunct grandeur, Trieste is less encumbered by the uglier workings of those dreams than other remnants of empire. Nostalgia, and a faith in abstract ideals, is perhaps easier there. In total, she portrays it as an idealised “nowhere”, conscious all the while that this is a projection from and of herself.

Jan Morris knew this when she painted Trieste as a “nowhere”, keeping herself – erudite, fond, fallible and melancholic – always in view. She helps see spaces that could be blandly branded liminal more sharply, and, if indirectly, encourages us to scrutinise how and why that atmosphere is produced. Some of Trieste’s great spaces have kept their purpose. The Palazzo delle Poste, built in 1894, is still the central post office, but most of its cavernous rooms appear shut off. Climb the mosaiced staircase and in the vast hall, below a florid mural, are a few yellow Poste Italiane counters such as you’d find in any provincial post office, with an electronic queuing system. You can fill out a form for home insurance on one of the old wooden counters, their edges blunted with use. The identities of other spaces have changed, or flickered back and forth, over time. The Savoia Excelsior Palace was built in 1911 to put up the Habsburg court attending the launch of the Austro-Hungarian Navy’s new flagship; after the Second World War, it was used as a base for British soldiers; today, it has been refurbished and reopened as a hotel specifically recalling Trieste’s past, designed as a series of “luxurious spaces that exude calm and imperial serenity”. (Morris stayed in it both as a soldier and as a tourist.) Government offices of the Habsburg Court are now filled with representatives of the region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, of which Trieste is the capital. Many other spaces are empty or half-used – warehouses and offices along the docks; decommissioned train stations; the whole area of Muggia, which borders Slovenia and whose regeneration into a cultural hub local councillors have been agitating over for years.

Notwithstanding its share of violent history, perhaps Trieste seems a city more at peace with its spaces than others. There’s something appropriate about the way in which the industrial docks around Muggia have not (yet) quite been converted into a slick arts centre or shopping destination. In his book Against Creativity (2008), social geographer Oli Mould describes the “place-making” missions of capitalism in contemporary cities – creating new “places” by pronouncing disused or otherwise unseemly environments as not places at all, often overlooking their real histories or identities. These kinds of glib transformations don’t seem to have taken hold in Trieste. One of the most popular spots for an aperitivo in the evening is Stazione Rogers (no relation), a fuel station built in 1957 that now serves as a cultural centre and has benches and tables made from old pallets outside for drinkers. Trieste could be full of places like this, yet it seems to resist such superficial transformation. Even Stazione Rogers feels pleasingly temporary in its reuse of the building and surroundings – neither virulently denying its previous identity nor hamming it up into a branding gimmick. 

Perhaps it’s because Trieste knows about soaking up history better than most places. The fascism that took hold of it in the early 20th century was predicated on a manipulated, caricatured past – embodied in the ancient Teatro Romano and the 1930s police station built in an echoing curve opposite. Above all it was predicated on superseding that curated past, an aim that was visualised in the slick, muscular, pistoned work of the Futurists (whose movement was launched in Trieste, by Filippo Marinetti, in 1910) and enshrined in the new calendar of the Era Fascista, in which 1922 became Anno I.

The literary modernism that flourished in this history-thick city is sometimes misconstrued as a similar shrugging off of the past in the search for the blazingly new. In fact, it depends on the past to not just define but construct its newness: Joyce’s language did not come from nowhere – of the Jan Morris variety or otherwise – but from extant languages, rich with relations and baggage and coincidence, from real people and places and from personal and social histories. 

Trieste was preeminent among these sources, though it’s typical that it seems to fall into its old haze in many critical considerations of Joyce’s relationship with the city. Tim Parks represents the reflexive position when he writes that “for Joyce the most important thing about Trieste was surely that it was not Dublin”. A closer look reveals a network of important influences. The character of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is a Hungarian Jew, while most Jews in Ireland were of German extraction; his model was likely Italo Svevo. The owner of the Berlitz School where Joyce worked, Almidano Artifoni, appears in Ulysses, while Svevo’s wife Livia shows up in Finnegan’s Wake, half-transfigured into the River Liffey. The Italian irredentism and Berlitz-school socialism Joyce encountered shaded and complexified his Irish nationalist politics. In the city’s streets can be traced the narratives and environments described in Dubliners, while for some scholars, the Triestino dialect that Joyce’s family spoke at home forms the basis of the idiolect of Finnegan’s Wake.

Joyce absorbed Trieste’s politics, its cacophonous languages, its transitory identity between nations and empires and its melee of people and peoples: above all, he absorbed the city’s liminal, eliding identity and understood it as no less real for it. Joyce shows perhaps better than anyone that Trieste’s liminality is not a matter of absence (“space to write”), but a rich presence to be metabolised. The last words of Ulysses, after all, aren’t quite the celebrated “yes I said yes I will Yes”, but a modest mapping of time and space: “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921”. ◉

All photography by the author