Last week, I took the train south from Klagenfurt (in south Austria) to Trieste. Reviewing Google maps, I had assumed that the train headed directly south through Slovenia. But history or geography planned a route that skirts Slovenia completely. The first train, running long distance to Venice, entered Italy at approximately Tarvisio. I changed to a local train in Udine that runs southeast to Gorizia, at the Slovenian border, before turning directly south, to the narrow spit of Italian coastal territory along the Adriatic that includes Trieste.
My sister asks if our parents brought us to Trieste in the 1960’s, but I do not remember it, and if she is right, we likely drove through it, on our way to Opatija on the Yugoslav coast. My present interest in Trieste comes from its relatively low profile. It is a port, a coffee port, polyglot, with a mixture of Italians and Slovenes and other Balkans. In this region Venice is the big draw for Americans, or sometimes the Croatian coast. Unlike the Austrians who ruled it for centuries, we don’t know much about it, and despite many trips to Europe, I too knew nothing.
And so my visit and observation has been in small increments, focusing on what I see and quickly reference on the internet, and now more broadly on my reading. For this, I read an interesting and informative memoir by the Welsh writer, Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, published in 2001.
My arrival in Trieste was at the main train station, where I walked through a modern addition with an impeccable marble and stainless steel bathroom, and then through an impressive, tall, waiting room from the Austrian period. I walked further, all the way to my hotel, in order to see the city. This was difficult, because of my heavy suitcase and the heat, but more so because the first streets were shabby and the handsome buildings ill-kept. But then the walk took me to the impressive Canale Grande, an old docking port that was built into the center of town, and then just a few blocks further to my small hotel.

What is it about Trieste that gives it an air of old time romance? Its buildings are not among the most historic in Europe, nor has it been a political capital, although it does have a Roman forum and amphitheatre.


Instead it is the 19th century that dominates Trieste, its past more bourgeois than aristocratic, and that may be the source of its intrigue. 19th century Trieste, that is Austrian Trieste–a port city, with its 4-6 story buildings and original, intact, facades–has been almost entirely preserved. They are colorful and classical, modestly grand, with style and ornament that reference ancient Rome, or Vienna, or occasionally Venice. And the buildings, while not old by European standards, feel old, a bit frozen in time, still useable without having ceded to the present. Collectively they say that Trieste is an active city, but that formerly it was a grand one. Indeed its relative importance, as the main port for the Austrian Empire, declined after it was ceded to Italy at the end of the First World War. And yet, Trieste is an active place, a commercial port, and a gateway city to the Balkans.




My hotel, Residenza le 6A, is in an old apartment building. It is really a pensione with just six rented rooms and a few short term rental units, on a stone-paved pedestrian street that terminates with a shopping street at one end and a white marble side of the classical church Sant’Antonio Nuovo, at the other. In the pavement, in front of the large double entrance door, are four brass plaques, or “stumbling stones” for members of the Goldschmied family who were deported from here in the early 1940’s. I was struck how this history had followed me from Vienna, where a few months ago, I stood at the doorway through which my grandmother’s older sister had also been deported.


Behind the doors, the entry hall is mammoth, with a tiled floor, huge glass and wrought iron doors at the rear, faded switches that add a few minutes of light, and a substantial stone staircase and tiny elevator to a large entry landing with two large pedimented double-doors and more switches. And then inside the pensione, dim, quiet, music, comfortable furniture, a breakfast area, and a reception desk, occupied in the morning by a very helpful Andrea. My room faces over the street, also quiet, with two new sets of windows, tall ceilings, an armoire, a side chair, a built in desk, air-conditioning, and a modern bathroom. And this is where I am writing.
On my second full day here, I took a public bus (6 or 36, across from the main train station) to Castello Miramare, perhaps the most visited site in Trieste. Like the city, it was built in the mid-19th century by Maximilian, a younger brother of the Austrian emperor, who was briefly the emperor of Mexico before his execution by “rebels”. It is pure gothic revival on the outside, more like an important English country house than a castle. Inside it is opulent and eclectic reflecting both its time and its attachment to the further past. It is grand, with an enfilade of gorgeous but not terribly private rooms, endless portraits of kings and Hapsburg family members and ancestors; there is even a grand bed of state—all a reminder of the authority and importance of the owner. The placement of the house at the edge of the Adriatic, the marble walk around it, the terraced garden, the bathing steps into the sea; these are the real inspirations and the beauty of this place.


Walking back to the bus, along a more plebian but living ocean front, I had lunch at a private beach club in its café overlooking the sea, then walked further along the shoreline, past sunbathers and some swimmers. A younger man, muscled and wet from the water, climbed on a bicycle in front of me, wearing only a small bathing suit and backpack, and pedaled barefoot a bit further down the shore to a public shower. A young woman, also shirtless and with smallish breasts, lay back on a towel along the walk. Everyone seemed at ease, their movement effortless and un-self-conscious.
On my way to the bus station, I had seen a small pastry and chocolate shop. So I stopped at Bomboniera on the way back to the hotel. The shop dates to the early 19th century, ornate, and high-ceilinged, with tall, carved display cases and a crystal chandelier. My strudel was a rolled nut cake with apricot jam, served on a “silver” tray with the coffee and a small glass of hot chocolate. The cake was better than what I find at most of the shops in Vienna. There are a few indoor seats, and then outside, tables in the middle of the pedestrian street. I saw this everywhere—pedestrian streets centered by café and restaurant tables. Frequently these places are busy, and while there are many visitors, most of the patrons sound local.


The hills in Trieste are older and quieter than the commercial city. The original city, the forum, the Roman amphitheater, the old city walls and the city’s cathedral are on a hill. So too are many 19th century buildings, and more meandering and some narrower streets, a contrast to the rational grid below, and some small café’s and restaurants. Also high up are some modern buildings, often depressing due to their lesser quality and maintenance, and some old 19th century mansions, indicating perhaps that portions of these hills were formerly bucolic and more desirable. As it is they are residential, quieter, and greener, with some flights of steps and small parks.



What may be the grandest mansion in Trieste is in a 19th century enclave near the port. Now the Museo Revoltella (Via Armando Diaz 27), the house was built for Pasquale Revoltella, a self-made importer, investor, and a significant backer of the construction of the Suez Canal. He was enobled by the Austrian emperor and left his wealth and the house to the city. The house, designed by a German-Jewish-to-Lutheran architect, George Hitzig, was converted into a museum in 1872, with its art collection and furniture intact. It is opulent, huge in scale, even larger due to its combination with an adjacent house. The permanent art collection and the furniture are impressive but arguably not extremely significant. However, the temporary exhibition was extraordinary, a collection of Impressionist paintings of Normandy, including two Monets. (Here is the link, https://museorevoltella.it/monet-e-gli-impressionisti-in-normandia/ ). I am rarely able to look at art of this quality without looking past or through other people. Here I was almost alone in the exhibition rooms and in the main house, a rare pleasure while traveling.

There were even fewer visitors at the Museum of Antiquity, J.J. Winckelmann (via della Cattredrale, 15) , named after a well-known German art historian and archeologist, who was murdered in Trieste in 1768, likely in a fit of anti-homosexual rage. The museum is also in a 19th century house. It and its institutional improvements are gently aging, but it has a large walled garden, sprinkled with antiquities, and inside, an excellent and accessible collection of ancient stone heads, busts and pottery. In the garden, and on the steps leading up the hill to the Cathedral, is a small temple, with inside, a monument to the archeologist.


I have eaten in various restaurants and cafés in Trieste, and generally, the food is more Italian than Viennese, and it is good. Eataly has a very attractive building on the port, much less crowded than the one in New York, and its restaurant has a gorgeous view, but it was closed for dinner when I went. Instead, anticipating a splurge, I stopped at Harry’s, which sits prominently on the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, linked with the five star Grand Hotel Duchi D’Aosta. I typically avoid places like this, but I was in a mood, and I’m writing, so I stopped first for a local white wine served with chips, nuts and olives and then moved across the terrace for a second glass of wine, pasta, and coffee. The service was friendly and elegant. Some, not all of the patrons, were very privileged Americans. The pasta was filling and very good; the bill was 40 euros.


On the morning before I left Trieste, I visited the Museum of the Jewish Community of Trieste at via del Monte 5/7, just a few blocks from my hotel. The museum is in a building that it shares with apartments (like my hotel), but it was formerly a Jewish hospital and later a refugee center and way-station for Jews fleeing central Europe for Palestine, the United States, or elsewhere. During the 1930’s the Jewish community helped others fleeing the Nazis, unaware that its members would also, eventually, need to be saved.
I was the only visitor, as the main synagogue is the more frequent draw, and learned that the Jewish community in Trieste now numbers only about 300 in a regional Jewish population of about 500. This small group is much reduced from its pre-World War II numbers (about 6,000 in 1938 per Wikipedia), but it nevertheless maintains a cemetery, the museum and a large neo-Moorish synagogue that was opened in 1912. The detailed and extensive exhibition focuses on the history of the community and its cultural contribution. Afterwards, I downloaded and am now reading Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo. I was told that he is required reading in Italian literature classes, although his fame was initially due to the support of James Joyce and French literary circles.
It has been very hot in Trieste the past couple of days. It is a late June afternoon, at 5 o’clock, at 91 degrees Fahrenheit (32.8 degrees Celsius), and I am hiding in my hotel room. I have seen enough on this trip and need to write down my admiration for this city’s manageable scale and frequent beauty. Next time, I’ll combine a visit with a ferry to the Croatian coast. Tomorrow, I am on nine-hour train back to Vienna. The first class ticket was for a small premium—well worth it for a long, but hopefully relaxing trip.
Trieste, June 27, 2022
Znojmo, Czechia
Yesterday I returned to Vienna by train from Znojmo, in the Czech Republic. Znojmo was the terminus of my trip, suggesting old links with Austria; however, the train was almost empty when it reached the town on Tuesday morning, and there were relatively few passengers at the beginning of my return. The train is much more crowded as it nears or leaves Vienna. Otherwise it makes a number of stops at smaller country-side stations, on a trip of about an hour and three quarters.
I am living some months this year in Vienna, to better understand my past and its present. Under new legislation (much delayed), the Austrian government gave us citizenship in September 2020, and a city of limited interest (to me), became intriguing. My mother was born in Vienna in 1928 and escaped to the United States in 1939.
My visit to Znojmo was suggested and organized by a cousin, Lilian W. S., also born in Vienna, in 1933, and whose family lived in Znojmo before escaping to Switzerland at the end of 1938 and to United States in 1941. Lilian then grew up in New York and married a cousin of my father. But she has kept contact with her home town. She reached out to a friend and asked him to organize a visit to her family’s former house, and to her maternal family’s factory.
photo by Eve
Znojmo is in Moravia, and Moravia and Bohemia were governed by the Austrian Hapsburgs, from the 16th century until 1918. The population was a mixture of Czechs and Austrian Germans, although the border areas were more heavily German, the eventual basis for Nazi claims. Znojmo (Znaim in German) is in this border area, then known as the Sudetenland, and annexed by Germany following the infamous Munich agreement of September 1938. At the end of the Second World War, the German population was pushed out.
Jews also lived in Znojmo beginning in at least the 14th century. The community was probably the largest in Moravia in the early 1400’s, but was then expelled in 1454 and not permitted to return until 1851. (In Vienna, we were expelled in 1670, but there were exceptions. Austrian emancipation was granted following the Revolution of 1848.) An impressive Moorish revival synagogue was built in Znojmo in 1878. It burned on Kristallnacht, in November 1938, and was eventually torn down.
Lilian’s family, Weinbergers on her father’s side and Lichtensterns on her mother’s, were successful industrialists. Her paternal grandfather, Alfred Weinberger (1860-1955) was born near Brno and owned a leather tannery in Znojmo. Her maternal grandfather, Oskar Lichtenstern, was born in Vienna in 1878 and moved to Znojmo following the Lichtenstern family purchase of the existing Rudolf Ditmar ceramics factory in 1912. The Lichtensterns later added a second Czech concern, creating Ditmar Urbach, to their original factory in Wilhelmsburg, west of Vienna. They shifted to the production of sanitary ceramics and opened subsidiaries in central Europe, Switzerland, Milan and Bombay. The businesses were expropriated by the Nazi’s in 1938 and 1939.
Before the War, Lilian’s family was oriented to Vienna; both sides of her family had property there; some eventually returned to Austria, but not to Czechoslovakia. Lilian grew up speaking German, and in her occasional strict reserve, she is still, subtly, a refugee and Viennese.
courtesy Lilian W. S.
Beyond the outskirts of Vienna, the train rode through a relatively flat landscape, but it undulates a bit, and the fields are very beautiful. As we crossed the Czech border, a new conductor scanned my ticket for a second time. Approaching Znojmo there is more forest, and the landscape is more mountainous, although the elevations are modest. The town is on a rise, overlooking the Dyje River.
Lilian’s friend, David G., met me at the station. We walked into town, past the outer Ring (in the Viennese style), past the greenbelt that replaced the city’s fortifications, past a late-19th century apartment house that had belonged to his grandparents, and into the old town center, organized around two public squares. Znojmo is not large, at about 33,000 residents, but it is concentrated, with an attractive and well-maintained historic core, a mixture of medieval, baroque and 19th century buildings, some courageously modernist 1930’s structures, and some very nice cafés. My hotel was small, some steps down from a medieval/baroque church, and from my room there was a view over the town’s outer districts, to the river, reservoir, and forested mountains. The weather was cool and the leaves were changing color.
Bata was a client of the Weinberger concern
David showed me around, and we had lunch before a 2:00 PM appointment at Lilian’s childhood house at 19 Rudoleckého Street. In the 1920’s three houses were built for Alfred Weinberger and his two sons, Hans and Fritz. They were side-by-side, in a newer neighborhood, outside the former city walls. In the years after World War I, Rudoleckého Street was known as Wilson Street.
Lilian’s house, that is her father Hans’ house, was designed by the Jewish/Czech architect Norbert Troller, with the interiors done by a Viennese architect and designer, Armand Weiser. The houses are still standing, but only the Hans Weinberger house is accessible; it is a nursery school.
The staff member who met us had copies of interior photographs from a 1928 article in Innen-Dekoration, a German design magazine published in Darmstadt. She helpfully matched the rooms to the photographs as she showed us the house. Here is the link to the full article: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/innendekoration1928/0435/image,info
The interior is largely intact, not so much upstairs, but on the main floor, where the entrance and main public rooms have been well preserved. The house blends clean-lined early 20th century modernism with more traditionally grounded arts-and-crafts elements. Its relatively small main entrance, on the side of the house, contrasts with a large cloak room and an enormous paneled “living hall”, still complete with built-in benches and a fireplace.
A formal French salon, with original fabric panels, is also at the front of the house, and it opens to a mahogany paneled dining room, kitchen areas and a gentleman’s room at the rear. Large paned windows face an enormous walled garden, now a worn play area, that must have given a beautiful view when it was fully planted.
The house is large, not huge; a breakfast room and a stove were at one time located adjacent to the bedrooms upstairs. The taste was sophisticated and up-to-date, reflecting the preferences of many affluent Jewish families. The simplicity of the house’s outer form and its clean lines are forward looking. The richly detailed arts-and-craft interiors are more traditional, but through the lens of late 19th and early 20th century design.
This is a comfortable place, almost understated; it is not modestly middle class, and it does not mimic the aristocratic. The house certainly depended on some level of staffing to operate. The school is evidently proud of the house; its interiors were protected by a former director; the local preservation office came in to give advice; and the woodwork is cleaned and treated once a year; clearly the memory of the house has some importance. Note the front windows, shaped like the tablets of the law, or like the round-arched windows on Moorish Revival synagogues; this subtle reference likely belongs to Norbert Troller.
The Weinberger tannery no longer exists, but following the visit to the house, we crossed the railroad tracks and visited a large factory complex that was formerly owned by the Lilian’s maternal family, the Lichtensterns. The old buildings are still there; although they have been extensively remodeled. And the factory still makes sanitary ceramics, toilets, sinks and shower basins, under the company name Laufen, which I see everywhere in Austria, now owned by the Barcelona-based Roca group. The Lichtenstern grandparents’ house was on the factory grounds, apparently with a well-tended garden. It is visible on an old print which hangs on the general manager’s office wall, but it no longer exists.
At the factory, I was welcomed to an interesting visit and short-course on sanitary ceramics production, by the smart, energetic general manager, Gabriel Mašek. The earthenware is produced in molds that have a limited life span; the glaze is sprayed-on by hand, although there is also robotics equipment. Earthenware is a natural material, occasionally inconsistent even under controlled conditions. So there is a small loss factor, as not all of the imperfections can be repaired. The Znojmo factory is not the largest in the group, but it produces some of the most specialized work. This is an old place, still forward looking and modern.
At the end of the day, David invited me to an unusual wine bar, with about 85 wines, in an old brewery, not far from my hotel. Tasting is automated. He chose wines from a printed menu, locating each in refrigerator cases by number. We then selected tasting, half glass or full glass portions, and tried a number of them, with a plate of sausage and cheese.
Phylloxera, two world wars, and communism were hard on this old Moravian wine region, although production had become increasingly sophisticated in the late 19th century. Since the fall of communism in 1989, there has again been an increase in education and new vineyards. I am not an expert, but at least two of the 6-7 wines I tasted were extremely good. Here is an article on Moravian wine production that is posted on-line: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2020/11/09/bottle-revolution-the-emerging-importance-of-the-wine-industry-in-south-moravia/
On the second day of my visit, David drove me to the Jewish cemetery a few minutes out of town—that is the “new” one that was founded in the 19th century. The medieval cemetery in town has mostly disappeared. The new cemetery is owned by the Brno Jewish community, as there is no longer a Jewish community in Znojmo. Most of the older stones are missing—sold during the communist era; they may now be paving stones in Prague and other cities.
David G. met Lilian at the cemetery in 2001 and then at a luncheon given for her a few years later, an event honoring the placement of brass stumbling stones or Stolpersteine, for her young cousin (pictured above with his grandfather) and an aunt who lived in the Weinberger house next door and disappeared during the War.
fate unknown”
David’s family, like Lilian’s, got out, just before the outbreak of the War, but returned to Znojmo, where he now lives with his wife and two children. His family was also very accomplished. His great-grandfather, a physician, moved to Znojmo from Bohemia and purchased the 19th century house he had shown me on the town’s outer Ring. His grandfather was also a doctor, largely serving the Czech community; his father and his mother were physicians. The family assimilated; neither David’s mother nor his wife are Jewish, but his father, grandparents and great-grandparents were, and they are buried in this cemetery.
David and his family now live in the family house, the fourth generation, but as far has he knows, he is now the only self-identified Jew in the town.
October 2022