All around me first-class passengers, awaiting the time to board their ship, are enjoying their last half-hour on Austrian solid before sailing away to America, Alexandria or the east… There are splashes of colour everywhere – braids and gilded epaulets, bright silks of summer, gaudy parasols and pink fringed reticules. She first went there as a young soldier after the Second World War (James Morris as she was at the time), when Trieste’s fate was still being fought over by the Italians and Tito’s Yugoslavs, not to be finalized for another decade. Thankfully, I have a fair bit of Joyce under my belt and have read Burton’s translation of The Book of the Thousand and One Nights (and, yes, all the footnotes! Incluso aún hoy día puede visitarse la librería de Umberto Saba (juraría que la llevaba cuando estuve un sobrino-nieto) o puede verse a Claudio Magris tomando café en el de San Marco. Morris likes attributing human characteristics to cities; for her, Trieste, is full of 'sweet melancholy'.

We were doing a grand tour of Venice, Florence, San Marino and their favorite Italian city – Riccione. Even so, Morris finds beauty and kindness in the city and its people, and it is this sensitivity towards Trieste that makes this such a moving and enchanting read. 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.Morris paints an interesting portrait of Trieste, a city I’ve never been to (and one which, according to a possibly apocryphal 1999 poll, 70% of Italians don’t realize is in Italy). In the twenty-first century, Trieste streets are jammed like any other European city with a quarter of a million people. The final part of that second sentence made me think of Shamima Begum, the teenager from Bethnal Green in London who travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State/Daesh and who subsequently had her British citizenship, one of six types of British nationality recognised by the UK Government, stripped from her. For Morris, though, this exile of age is also a freedom – “most things don’t matter as they used to”.

Morris discreetly projects his own story in this city where the definition of self is a bit circumvented.

At its best, the prose, is charged with meaning and evidence of months, years of meditation on the city… and therefore of life in general and Morris’ life in particular. He and Perry talked about that point in life where it no longer matters what other people think and the liberation it brings. But maybe that's what makes the author so remarkable, because this has never happened to me before when reading about Trieste - she really managed to get into the very heart of this city, and report the very feelings it arises.