Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. For a place with such a history of changes of ruling state and such a multicultural population, it’s to be expected that Trieste would have a thriving Jewish community.

He and Perry talked about that point in life where it no longer matters what other people think and the liberation it brings. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared… The Caffè Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct… Those silken and epauletted passengers, with all they represented, have vanished from the face of Europe, and I am left all alone listening to the band. We stand with her at the Obelisk that marks the Habsburg city limits and look down on the old walled city and its modern neighbour as she reflects on the city’s present and its interrupted past. Since she first visited it as a soldier at the end of the Second World War Trieste has haunted Morris and she has written widely about it. They transcend religion, race, age, wealth, and nationality and share common values like humor and understanding.In Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris explores a place that had deep personal meaning to her. This was the class of society that had, in my view, held the balance of civilisation everywhere, tempering the arrogance of the aristocracy, restraining the crudity of the masses.

The images lend an air of nostalgia to the writing, old as they are, and presented in a frame suggestive of a photograph album, and feel as though they are from a family collection that Morris is sharing with us.

My acquaintance with the city spans the whole of my adult life, but like my life it still gives me a waiting feeling, as if something big but unspecified is always about to happen. Inside, I’m not the chronological age I am, but I know that the people who are the age I feel view me as that chronological age. In the Epilogue, she quotes a line from the Wallace Stevens poem Tea at the Palaz of Hoon to show that this book about Trieste and about exile is a book about herself, an exile from normality in the years she spent living in the gender of her biological sex, and at the age of 75 an exile from time itself. She also makes reference to both places having a “conscious sense of separateness”, due to their both being “innovative, technological place[s], not hampered by nostalgia”.

What was the function of the small park opposite the rail station in the early 1990s after the Berlin Wall fell? Morris reached a similar conclusion, asking, “Could it be that racism is a sort of historical invention, a Satanic hoax? The Viennese playwright Hermann Bahr, arriving there in 1909, said he felt as though he was suspended in unreality, as if he were ‘nowhere at all’.

The clothes people wear, the idioms they use, their pronunciation, their assumptions, tastes, humours, loyalties all become more alien the older you get. A escolha desta dupla pertença nacional é propositada dando destaque à ao passado e ao presente desta cidade, que a autora retrata magistralmente. One has only to look back at those photos of disobedient Africans in iron collars to know how benign the British Empire was.