Thinking Peripherally with Miramare, Part II
This essay is the second of a two-part series. Follow the link to read Part 1 .
The Meaning of Nowhere? Geopolitical Periphery
In 1864, Maximilian departed Miramare for the final time, though this was surely not his intention. He left Trieste as a Habsburg archduke; he arrived in Veracruz as a Mexican Emperor. Fittingly, the frigate that conveyed him across the Atlantic, the SMS Novara, was also the first Habsburg naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in 1857-1859. The scientific ambitions—both cosmopolitan and exoticist—of the Novara’s first voyage were entangled with the political aims of its second journey in 1864. Both imperial science and imperial statecraft in the mid-nineteenth century were premised on the subjugation and domestication of remote places, objects, and peoples.
Like the castle itself, the botanical cornucopia of Miramare’s gardens is a legacy of empire—exotic succulents, the ancestors of which were cargo on the Novara, represent another imperial domestication of the distant and the foreign. But the gardens also host other, divergent geopolitical legacies. In the palazzo’s courtyard, a plaque on a block of marble announces that “Historic Miramare Castle was the Headquarters of Trieste United States Troops from 16 September 1947 to 24 October 1954 (Figure 1). They secured the borders, preserved peace, and re-established freedom and democracy, leading to the return of Trieste to Italy.” Unspoken words bear immense weight in this commemoration. American and British troops occupied Trieste for nearly a decade following World War II as the geopolitical borders of the Cold War calcified. The city—always defined in part by its Slovene-speaking minority and hinterland—was nearly incorporated into Tito’s Yugoslavia. Ultimately, “freedom and democracy,” the watchwords of anti-communism, prevailed, and Trieste remained Italian. In fact, it became even more so, as Italian-speaking refugees from Istria poured into the city, fleeing the onset of Yugoslav sovereignty over the bulk of the peninsula in the aftermath of the war.
Figure 1. Dissonant Cold War histories at Miramare. Photograph by author.
Trieste—Roman Tergeste, Trst in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian, Triest in German—has had many profiles over time: Roman provincial town; Medieval backwater; imperial entrepot and emporium; cradle for writers as various as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and Claudio Magris; object of irredentist desire and Fascist reform; occupied territory and political football; Cold War borderland; and, most recently, the premier site for Habsburg nostalgia on the Adriatic. This chameleon city is a palimpsest of its myriad incarnations in a series of polities and political worldviews; occasionally, this multiplicity almost feels like “nowhere,” as Jan Morris famously—and errantly—romanticized. Rather than nowhere, this port city integrates a variety of elsewheres, a pentimento of peripheries that mirrors and resonates with Miramare’s history (Figure 2).
Figure 2. A late nineteenth century map of Habsburg Trieste. Image courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Creative Common License CC-BY-SA-3.0.
An allegorical fountain at the city’s center heralds Trieste’s commitment to this plurality of elsewheres. Fontana dei Quattro Continenti, the Fountain of the Four Continents, anchors the Piazza Unità d’ Italia (Piazza Grande). This baroque folly by Giovanni Battista Mazzoleni was dedicated in 1754 to celebrate Trieste’s status as an imperial free port, granted earlier in the century by Emperor Charles VI, as well as more recent urban reforms introduced by his daughter, Maria Theresa (Figure 3). Feminine figures representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America stand at the cardinal points on the rim of the fountain. On the body of the fountain itself, four additional sculptures, allegories of the great continental rivers, the Danube, Ganges, Nile and Río de Plata, pour water forth from ewers. The garish, unavoidable monument to both the aquatic and the global, salutes Trieste’s abiding dependence on distant shores.
Figure 3. Trieste’s Fountain of the Four Continents. Photograph by the author.
As the Fountain of the Four Continents attests, Trieste’s Habsburg heyday was premised on the integration of multiple geographic peripheries, channeling their resources and peoples to and from the empire. Its own ambiguity, on a geopolitical border between the Habsburgs and Italy, a linguistic frontier between Romance and Slavic languages, and a geophysical zone of transition between the sea and the limestone karst plateau above, buttressed Trieste’s play of peripheralities.
Recently, Trieste’s multiple pasts have achieved a similar coordination and orchestration. The Habsburg era now reigns benevolently over other epochs, at least in most public spaces. The statue of Empress Elisabeth, Sissi, Franz Josef’s glamorous consort, has returned to the plaza just opposite the railway station. Similarly, Maximilian’s monument recently reascended its plinth on Piazza Venezia after ninety years of exile (Figure 4).
“Rather than nowhere, this port city integrates a variety of elsewheres, a pentimento of peripheries that mirrors and resonates with Miramare’s history. ”
Figure 4. Maximilian’s Return on Piazza Venezia. Photograph by Author
Yet unsettling pasts persist. Piazza Unità was the forum for Mussolini’s declaration of Italy’s anti-Semitic race laws in 1938, a grim chapter in the city’s history that contemporary Habsburg nostalgia has obscured. To the south of the city center, collective memories of fascism and the Holocaust are more vocal and visible. During the Nazi occupation of Adriatisches Küstenland, the Adriatic Littoral, Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice-husking facility, became an infamous concentration camp, site of political executions and point of transit for Jewish captives, most of whom were bound for Auschwitz. Nationalist and fascist heritage is even more “difficult” elsewhere in the city. Only a few hundred meters away from the sun-kissed statue of Sissi on Piazza Libertà, a darker monument resides in sepulchral shadow: the Shrine to Guglielmo Oberdan (Figure 5). In 1882, Oberdan attempted to assassinate Franz Josef during the latter’s visit to Trieste to commemorate half-a-millennium of Habsburg rule in the city. Upon his execution, Oberdan became a martyr to the Italian irredentist cause. Today, the fascist-era monument to this would-be regicide resides in startling proximity to the more public commemoration of Franz Josef’s beloved, Sissi.
Figure 5. The Difficult Heritage of Guglielmo Oberdan. Photograph by author.
Trieste’s delicate reconciliation with its dissonant pasts reverberates in Miramare as well. In the 1990s, fascism made an uncanny return to the castle. During the 1930s, Miramare was the residence of the family of Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, a staunch supporter of Mussolini and the eventual Viceroy of Italian East Africa, the main colonial theatre of the fascist state. The rooms of the Duke of Aosta and his family on Miramare’s second floor were restored in 1996, and now constitute a discordant intermezzo in the museum tour. This rather spare space, with its subdued art deco ornamentation and modernist furniture produces aesthetic disorientation (Figure 6). Fittingly, this fascist-era section of Miramare will soon house an exceptional irredentist artwork, “The Allegory of Trieste and Istria” by Annibale Strata (1861), which depicts the city as a heroine eager to be “redeemed” by Italy. The quarters of the Duke of Aosta are both heterotopic and heterochronic in relation to rest of Miramare: a space and a “slice” of time that is incompatible yet contiguous with Maximilian’s regal residence. This lamination of heterotopias aptly encapsulates Trieste as a whole.
Figure 6. The WC in the Duke of Aosta’s Miramare rooms. Photograph by author.
Miramare’s Others
Like most heterotopias, Miramare not only integrates disparate spaces and places—it is also reiterated and reoriented in multiple sites elsewhere. In Austrian Carinthia, one hundred fifty kilometers north of Miramare, the Minimundus theme park offers a dramatically different encounter with the Schloss: in miniature (Figure 7). Here, Miramare is one among a legion of iconic structures from across the globe, each rendered at a scale of 1:25. It rests on the bank of a pond near replicas of the Statue of Liberty and, coincidentally, Lisbon’s Tower of Belém, mentioned in Part 1 of this essay. The Minimundus website reports that the maquette of Miramare is one of the park’s most intricate, detailed works: “The model of Miramare Castle took 26 months and around 28,000 pieces of marble stones and 26,000 pieces of sandstone to finish.” Susan Stewart proposes that “the miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time” (p. 46). Such is Minimundus’ Miramare: reduced in size, the castle—already a relative miniature in comparison to the gargantuan palaces of Vienna—is unmoored from its history to become a deterritorialized, dehistoricized object of heritage, fungible in meaning with its replicated peers.
Figure 7. Miramare in miniature. Photograph by author.
“Miramare is not merely a castle on a Mediterranean promontory—it is the afterlife of a manse in Switzerland, the partner to a Viennese palace, the prelude to a citadel in Mexico City, a model for kitsch miniaturization in Carinthia, a ruin’s forgotten inspiration in Slovenia and the partner of a vanished mansion off Dubrovnik.”
One hundred kilometers southeast of Klagenfurt, another ersatz Miramare stands on the slope of a narrow river valley near the glassworks and defunct coal mine of Hrastnik, Slovenia. Rather than miniaturization, this homage to Miramare is a study in ruination. Villa di Seppi was constructed in 1894 for Emma di Seppi, a Habsburg baroness. Reportedly, its Triestino architects, Leonardo Fantennutti and Anton Melan, modelled the villa on Miramare, and the similarities between the two structures are unmistakable. In contrast to Miramare’s buffed exteriors and curated interiors, Villa di Seppi is a shambles (Figure 8). Under the ownership of the Hrastnik glass factory since 1939, the villa has dwindled into desuetude in recent decades. Although it was proclaimed a site of local heritage in 2006, its doors remained locked and its façades continue to crumble. Rather than seizing the passage of time in the manner of heritage sites such as Miramare, the ruin of Villa di Seppi foregrounds, in Svetlana Boym’s words, “the disharmony and the ambivalent relationship between human, historical, and natural temporalities.”
Figure 8. Villa di Seppi, a ruinous reminiscence of Miramare. Photograph by author.
Still further south, six hundred kilometers down the eastern Adriatic coast, little remains of Miramare’s lost sibling. Lokrum Island, opposite the famous walled city of Dubrovnik, offered another marine vista that gripped Maximilian’s imagination and provoked his acquisitiveness. He and Charlotte built a villa here, too, integrated with a restored 12th century Benedictine monastery. Today, this Adriatic pleasure palace is no more, but other traces of the imperial couple remain: Charlotte’s well, the gardens of Maximilian. The most colorful imperial legacy on Lokrum is living: an ostentation of peacocks, descendants of the birds that Maximilian brought to the island (Figure 9). Their avian splendor contrasts sharply with the grubbiness of Miramare’s feral cats, whose urine threatens the delicate exotics that bloom in the gardens.
Figure 9. Maximilian’s resplendent living legacy on the island of Lokrum. Photograph by author.
Whether interpreted biographically as an expression of Maximilian’s life, aesthetically as an architectural legacy, or geopolitically as a site redolent of the contradictions that subtend Trieste, Miramare is a peripheral place. Peripheries inhabit it; sites peripheral to it form a suggestive constellation of post-imperial memories and legacies. Miramare is not merely a castle on a Mediterranean promontory—it is the afterlife of a manse in Switzerland, the partner to a Viennese palace, the prelude to a citadel in Mexico City, a model for kitsch miniaturization in Carinthia, a ruin’s forgotten inspiration in Slovenia and the partner of a vanished mansion off Dubrovnik.
Nearly fifty years after Maximilian’s fatal departure from Miramare, another romantic figure sojourned nearby. In 1911, at the twilight of the Empire, Rainer Maria Rilke spent several restorative, inspirational weeks in Duino, a peninsula and hamlet just ten kilometers to Miramare’s north. From his retreat at Duino Castle, where he was the guest of Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Miramare’s ivory silhouette was visible on the southern horizon. In the first of his Duino Elegies, Rilke offers a fitting, inadvertent motto for Miramare: “A wave swelled toward you out of the past...” (p. 5). Adriatic waves continue to lap at Miramare’s pier, slowly eroding the limestone boulders at the base of the cliff on which it stands. Meanwhile, swells out of the past buffet and polish the castle according to less predictable rhythms.
The author would like to thank Pamela Ballinger, Maura Hametz, Maximilian Hartmuth, Franci Lazarini, Daša Ličen, Alessio Mazzaro, and Robert Walton for their exceptional comments and recommendations.
