Trieste è una donna: Woman and Urban Space in Svevo's Senilità

Abstract

Conoscete la «saica» la bella Carintiana?Era una nave tutta di legno dolce, inventata a Trieste, che vendeva sé con tutto il carico, per non far, vuota di mercanzia e d'utilità, la strada del ritorno.Trieste è una «saica» traverso i secoli (Slataper, Lettere triestine, 12).iSlataper's statement, taken from one of the several provocative articles he wrote in 1909 during his collaboration with the Florentine journal La Voce, captures one of the central issues that defined Trieste from the late eigh- teenth century until the Great War.Prior to the end of the First World War, Trieste belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.Situated just outside of the newly created Italian state, the city was politically and culturally peripheral with respect to Rome and Vienna, but at the same time, as the only port of the empire, it developed into a thriving economic centre.From the eighteenth century onward it was granted the status of free port, with all the privileges and exemptions this entailed.^Asa result, Trieste attracted people"Do you know the saica "La Bella Carintiana"?It was a ship made of soft wood, devised in Trieste, that sold itself with all its load so as not to make the return journey void of payload and use.Trieste is a saica [voyaging] through the centuries."Here and elsewhere, all translations from the Italian are mine, unless otherwise indicated.^One should not think that the fact that the city was thriving economically meant that it was also an important cultural or political centre.The historian Elio Apih has already commented on the cultural marginality of Trieste at the turn of the twentieth century: "alia grande crescita del porto adriatico non corrispondeva un adeguato sviluppo di istituzioni, e la città resta periferica rispetto ai grandi centri produttori di cultura [...]; chi in quegli anni nasceva letterato doveva cercare il suo prestigio civile rifacendosi alla tradizione culturale italiana come tale, alla kulturnation (è a questa tradizione, non a quella locale che fa riferimento lo pseudonimo emblematico di Italo Svevo).E per riallacciarsi a questa tradizione che la nuova generazione intellettuale va a Roma e a Firenze."Apih, Trieste, 96.

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