Unitalian
On my last morning in Trieste I talked to an Italian who didn’t speak Italian and a Finn who didn’t speak Finnish. (The Italian lived in a close-to-the-border, German-speaking part of Italy and the Finn lived in a Swedish-speaking part of Finland.) Whilst I only spent a limited time in Trieste, the city felt a bit like an Italian city that wasn’t really that Italian and so these encounters seemed appropriate.
Trieste has buildings built by Serbian immigrants that came over to work a few centuries ago. It has a large Armenian church. The synagogue in the city, though seldom used for religious services these days, is the second largest in Europe. The city sits about twenty minutes away from the Slovenian border which itself is only a short distance from the Croatian border.
With only one full day in Trieste I started, like I usually do when the opportunity presents itself, with a free walking tour. Given the size of the city, the group was small but the tour was still informative. It was a bit rainy that day so after the tour another attendee and I tried to find a museum to go to. The first two museums we went to were closed because it was a Monday. The third was a small exhibition on the history of fashion hidden on the third floor of an office building. It’s tickets were overpriced considering we were just looking for a place to get out of the rain so that ended up being a no too. Eventually we found a museum/gallery which was formerly the palatial home of a wealthy Triestian. We moved at a slow pace around the museum as my fellow traveller sought to justify the entrance fee by reading every word of English in the museum.
With all the multicultural confusion of Trieste, there was something quite familiar I had noticed. When the train pulled into Trieste station on the afternoon I arrived, I noticed a large, familiar-looking yacht floating a short distance off of the port. I recognised the boat because, even with my limited nautical knowledge, the world’s (probably) most expensive yacht looks quite distinct. With sleek, silver masts that stretch out into the air, ‘Sailing Yacht A’ is unashamedly noticeable. Apparently there are smaller motor boats housed inside the yacht. One can only imagine that some of those boats have smaller boats inside them - a babushka boat, if you will.
The boat was/is owned by a Russian oligarch but it was seized over a year ago after the invasion into Ukraine. And so the expensive yacht sat in the port, unused. I tried thinking of ways to get into the yacht (no one was using it) and workshopped these with some of the people I met at my hostel. However no one else was willing to put up the money to hire a motor boat for the afternoon nor could I locate any shops close by that sold a rope ladder.
