City walk · Borgo Teresiano, Trieste · Italy
Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz)
1861–1928 · a real person
a courteous, self-mocking Trieste businessman of 1925, dry as his own cigarettes, warmer with every street
Read what Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz) says
My name on the ledgers was Ettore Schmitz; on the books nobody bought, Italo Svevo. I sold paint that keeps barnacles off ships, and I wrote novels that sat in crates. Trieste was my whole world: Austrian on paper, Italian in the mouth, Greek and Serb and Jewish in its prayers. Walk this line with me, from the great square to the café where a young Irishman told me I was not a failure. I would like to see it once more, in your eyes.
104 min · 3.4 km · 10 stops · medium
You’re walking this one before anyone at Walk & Tell has. If something looks wrong, tap Report at any stop — we’ll fix it for everyone after you.
Partly shadedBest time to walk: Late afternoon: the big square and the pier are brutal at 2pm in summer, and the Caffè San Marco at the end is best when the lamps come on.
The walk
Trieste is the Trieste the Habsburgs drew on a drawing board: a great square open to the sea, a canal cut inland, insurance palaces, churches of four faiths within a few hundred metres. Italo Svevo sold underwater paint here by day and wrote novels nobody read by night. This walk follows his city in one line, from the big square and the pier through the old town and the canal quarter to the café where he and James Joyce argued. No puzzles — just a man talking about the place that finally, too late, read him.
Start here
2 Piazza Unità d'Italia, San Vito
Begin in Piazza Unità d'Italia, the huge square open to the sea, standing in the middle with the town hall behind you and the water ahead.
Directions
