Narrative, roman Anyone who lies in the shadow of Venice has a hard time getting attention. Trieste has been dawning under Maria Theresa since the kissing awake. But there are busy authors and more and more quality tourists who deal with the city carefully. “Trieste for the advanced” is the name of an ambitious volume with essay-like travel literature, current pictures and city maps. So the book offers more than an overview, more of a perspective.
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Georges Desrues remains honest from the start: Of course he is madly in love with this city, otherwise he would not have lived there for the last five years, but Trieste is neither the Mecca of antiquity nor of the Renaissance. And while the Grand Canal in Venice became a showpiece for strolling and celebrating, the Grand Canal in Trieste remained a very use-related piece of water for loading and unloading freight. But Trieste was also the opening to the Mediterranean for the north and, last but not least, for monarchist Austria, so to speak, the colorful handkerchief of the otherwise rather staid Habsburg monarchy. With the free port, the gateway to the world was created and people from all over the world were allowed in: traders who built lavish villas, Syrians, Armenians and British who absorbed entire streets and even neighborhoods. With the Borgo Teresiano, the Habsburgs created an entire district according to their ideas and also the only open main square to the sea in Italy, the Piazza dell’Unità.
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The exciting thing about “Trieste for the advanced” is that architecture from several centuries was drawn up in a kind of historical timeline: from antiquity to Art Deco classics to Art Nouveau buildings, elements from fascism and rather dubious renovations of the city are not included short. In general, I would like to thank the native French for dealing very soberly with facts such as fascism and left or right-wing extremism and for allowing them to flow objectively into the chapters. Whether it is the guided paths to the karst plateau that give you a relaxing view of unorthodox Italy, for example the overwhelming area of the old port, which is at the same time a visionary industrial monument and a bearer of hope for a historical and modern Trieste. May the policy orient itself, because after the abrupt death of the mayor Riccardo Illy, one longs for a successor with similar luminosity.
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As an encore, someone who can really do it, and fortunately also receives the necessary attention, is Max Annas, German crime novel writer who repeatedly deals with topics from his country. In his current novel, Der Hochsitz, the resurrected RAF ghost haunts Germany in 1978, which is also wreaking havoc in a small village in the Eifel, not far from the border with Luxembourg. In addition, there are bank robberies in a strange accumulation and a Cadillac with a Frankfurt license plate, which noticeably often drives through villages and leaves farmers excessive offers to buy for their farms. There is a lot to be cleared up in a quiet village where nothing else happens. A masterfully cut work with surprising twists and turns in a political Germany of the 1970s.
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