Trieste – The World in One City

07.01.2025

Today I will attempt to summarize the development of cinematic culture in Trieste. I will discuss some well-known facts, such as the favourable view of cinema held by Trieste’s writers and intellectuals, or the city’s role as a bridge between Western and Eastern cinema. However, I also want to highlight a less discussed aspect: the presence of women in Trieste’s cinematic culture over the years.When talking about culture in Trieste, one usually refers to literary rather than cinematic culture. Trieste is famous as the city of Italo Svevo, James Joyce and Umberto Saba, and, in more recent years, of Giorgio Pressburger, Susanna Tamaro and Claudio Magris. But these writers were also famously attracted to cinema, whether as operators (Joyce, Saba) or due to the influence of Charlie Chaplin (Svevo), or for their desire to make films (Pressburger, Tamaro, and even Claudio Magris, who has often reiterated this keenness in recent interviews).

As renowned film critic Alberto Farassino wrote, Trieste was “the first Italian city where very intense and concrete relationships developed between intellectuals and the silver screen.”

But what caused this love for cinema among Trieste’s writers, from which cinema undoubtedly benefited? And more broadly, why has cinema played such an important role in the lives of many Triestines?

One reason may lie in Trieste’s peripheral nature. Geographically at the centre of Europe, it can still feel distant from everything. Thus, Triestines may have clung to cinema as a surrogate for travelling, a window into distant, more central and more interesting worlds. This attitude could also explain the diaspora starting in the 1950s of critics like Tullio Kezich, Callisto Cosulich, Tino Ranieri, and numerous thespians such as Federica Ranchi and Livio Lorenzon, who, distinguished by their mimicry skills, went to Cinecittà to be character actors.

Another historical reason for the interest in cinema among Triestines could be the multicultural composition of the city’s population. In the early 1900s, the Slovenian population in Trieste numbered 50,000 inhabitants, more than in Ljubljana. In this context, all the worn-out clichés regarding Trieste (melting pot, free zone) actually hold true, because in a city that has unfortunately been the scene of dramatic clashes, cinema has mostly been a symbol of inclusion, encounters, and cultural exchanges.

In a community of foreigners, the eminently visual language of cinema has always represented a factor of rapprochement, overcoming barriers between different identities. Indeed, since the earliest days of cinema, Trieste has served as a bridge to Central Europe. It was, for example, the Trieste company Curiel-Crassé with Enrico Pegan, a Lumière concessionaire, that, starting in 1896, exported and screened the first films in Ljubljana and Zagreb.

Returning to Joyce, it would appear that it was his sister Eileen who sparked his interest in cinema in 1909 with the idea of opening a permanent cinema in Dublin (where there were none, while Trieste already had about ten, in line with other major Italian cities).

That image held by Eileen of Trieste as a city of cinema is the first example of the very denotation that gives the title to my talk, “Trieste – The World in One City”. It’s a reference to the 1952 Hollywood film Diplomatic Courier, specifically the scene where, while flying over Trieste, a steward explains to the protagonist Tyrone Power why Trieste is such a contended city: “What Lisbon and Istanbul were to the last war, Trieste is to this one,” he says. “Agents, counter-agents, hatchet men, Titoists, anti-Titoists, Stalinists, anti-Stalinists ... More high jinks than a circus”—which in the Italian dubbed version became “the world in one city”.

The star of Diplomatic Courier, Tyrone Power, did not take part in the filming in Trieste, as he was replaced by a stand-in, so, just like his character in the film, he also only got to know Trieste from a distance, through its image alone—which seems to be quite the common denominator for this city. As the adopted Triestine German novelist Veith Heinichen said to journalist Paolo Rumiz in 2002: “Few people know Trieste, but many imagine it.”

Returning to Joyce for one last time, judging by how he and his sister Eileen appear to have had a keen interest in cinema and films, I like to think, though there is no evidence to suggest it, that Joyce and Svevo also talked about cinema when they would meet in Trieste. But while we know nothing about that, we do know that Silvio Benco and Umberto Saba did, as Anna Gruber, Benco’s niece, recalled “intense conversations” between them.

For Trieste, talking about and discussing cinema is, of course, not much different from any other place in the world. The difference, perhaps, is that in this city it happened, over time, intermittently, the cinema culture vanishing and re-emerging much like a karst river. A path of disappearances and rebirths, where fortunately there has always been someone to pass the torch.

We arrive thus to the post-war period, and to a Trieste administered by the Allied Military Government. The torch of the conversations between Benco and Saba was picked up by two young men from distinguished families, Callisto Cosulich, heir to a shipping dynasty, and Tullio Kezich, son of a lawyer who lived across from the house where Svevo had lived.

Both grew up with a love for cinema born among the city’s thirty or so motion-picture theatres and summer screenings at the city park. Precocious critics at the “Il Piccolo” newspaper (then “Giornale di Trieste”) and Radio Trieste respectively, Cosulich and Kezich were contacted in 1947 by sculptor Marcello Mascherini to start the Entertainment Section of the Culture and Arts Society: a grandly named home base for what may have been Italy’s first modern film club. The two enfant terribles were perhaps also inspired by the first post-war editions of the Venice Film Festival that were headed from 1946 to 1948 by Elio Zorzi and which featured retrospectives on Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir.

But the Trieste of the Allied Military Government was also where international films in their original languages were being shown earlier and in greater numbers than in the rest of Italy.

The first screening of the Culture and Arts Society took place on 15 February 1948, with René Clair’s Le Million at Politeama Rossetti, and their activities continued into the early Fifties with intense cycles and a lucidly alternative programme that, in Anglo-American Trieste, also screened Soviet films. The goal was “to host those films that for any reason find it difficult, if not impossible, to be shown in regular theatres, subject to our incurable provincialism and conformism” (as read in a forward-looking typewritten document of the time).

The evenings were well attended and featured guests such as the great documentarian Joris Ivens and a debuting Michelangelo Antonioni, who presented Story of a Love Affair to the public for the first time. Present in the audience were, naturally, intellectuals like Giani Stuparich and Anita Pittoni. The screenings were held not only at the Rossetti theatre but also throughout the city, at the Alabarda, the Fenice, the Ridotto del Verdi, and the Cinema del Mare on the Rive esplanade (now Casa del Cinema).

I have always been intrigued by how Kezich and Cosulich viewed the city at the time, strictly in cinephilic terms. In the Trieste as described in Diplomatic Courier, the “world in one city” populated by Titoists and anti-Titoists—to which even Vittorio Vidali, a controversial figure of the international communist movement, had returned in 1947—, Kezich and Cosulich described (and experienced) it as a parallel city made of celluloid, akin to New York’s Village or the Latin Quarter in Paris. For instance, they searched for Tino Ranieri, whom they didn’t know, as if he were a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel among critics: “We would occasionally hear of this mysterious character,” Kezich wrote, “nestled in the suburbs, who knew everything about cinema and preached its gospel in circles unknown to us.”

For Kezich and Cosulich, the Trieste of that era was almost like a widespread film club, dotted with original-language screenings, or a metropolitan festival before its time, where there was room for pre-1968 situationist gestures, such as the event that became known as the “Bicycle Thieves revolt”. This occurred when Cosulich, invited to present Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet at a gala premiere at Cinema Excelsior as a critic for “Giornale di Trieste”, unexpectedly invited everyone in the audience to switch theatres, cross the street, and watch Bicycle Thieves instead. De Sica’s film was being screened for a few days at the nearby Fenice cinema as a filler between two American motion pictures. So, if for Hollywood Trieste was “the world in one city”, for Kezich and Cosulich that post-war world was only cinema.

Indeed, the Trieste of the Allied Military Government also attracted the first major film sets, from the border Neorealism of Cuori senza frontiere (The White Line) to the patriotic melodrama Trieste mia! on one side, and on the other, Trst by France Štiglic, the second feature film of the emerging Slovenian cinema, up to the first spy stories like the British Sleeping Car to Trieste or the aforementioned American Diplomatic Courier. We don’t know whether Vittorio Vidali mingled with the audience to see these spy films, which would probably have made him smile, but what we do know is that decades later he would cry in the darkness of a screening at Cappella Underground, where a film by his lover Tina Modotti, who died in Mexico in unclear circumstances, was being shown.

After Cosulich and Kezich emigrated, to Rome in 1950 and Milan in 1953 respectively, in a city with more motion-picture theatres per capita than any other Italian city, the torch of cinematic culture was picked up by critics like Libero Mazzi at “Il Piccolo” and Carlo Ventura for meetings at the Culture and Arts Society. But also by political figures oddly infected by a deep love for cinema. I’m referring to Arduino Agnelli, who in October 1954 spun off the University Film Club from a branch of the Culture and Arts Society, and Michele Zanetti, the future president of the Province (the one who would famously bring Franco Basaglia to head the Trieste psychiatric hospital), who founded the Trieste Cineforum in 1956. These initiatives kept the cinematic passion alive in the city, also looking towards Central Europe, with cycles on the Czech New Wave or German expressionist cinema.

This passion was also evidenced by heated debates. For instance, on 15 February 1960, during a meeting on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita at the Culture and Arts Society in collaboration with the University Film Club, the police had to intervene to control some enraged people who had been excluded. Conducted by Tino Ranieri, the meeting was stirred by a clash between voices against and in favour of the film, including those of Marcello Mascherini, the younger Michele Zanetti and Gianni Menon, and, surprisingly, a Jesuit, Father Andreoli, who was reportedly strongly applauded.

The following year, in 1961, Trieste was once again an important film set with Claudia Cardinale under the (artificial) rain in Bolognini’s Senilità (Careless), the first film adapted from an Italo Svevo novel, as well as the first film to be adapted from Triestine literature. Senilità was followed by numerous films inspired by novels or stories by, among others, Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, Giani Stuparich, Umberto Saba and Franco Vegliani, the most remarkable of which were perhaps directed by the Triestine Franco Giraldi. In these films, as Alberto Farassino put it, “the physical city is doubled and filtered through the mental, emotional, or nostalgic city, almost to the point of creating an additional scenic space.”

And it’s after Senilità that, from July 1963, Trieste found the impetus to host the world’s first Science Fiction Film Festival. The idea was born from a group of Venetian writers, which found support in the city from the aforementioned Libero Mazzi, and from Duilio Magris, Claudio Magris’s father and head of the autonomous tourist board, who sponsored the festival with 10 million lire. Not just a world in one city, then, but indeed many other worlds in one city.

The Science Fiction Film Festival, which would last, in its first cycle, for twenty years, had a special relationship with American independent cinema (Roger Corman above all) and British cinema (Amicus and Tigon studios), with intriguing figures from the Nouvelle Vague like Pierre Kast and Jean-Daniel Pollet. But most importantly, it played a significant role in introducing productions of this genre from Eastern Europe to the West.

Film critic Goffredo Fofi testified to this: “The Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival was extraordinary because it broke through the wall that still separated us from Eastern Europe,” Fofi told Alessandro Mezzena Lona in an interview eight years ago. “I still remember Russian science fiction films and a Czechoslovak one, Late August at the Hotel Ozone by Jan Schmidt, which depicted a post-apocalyptic future where only women had survived. A small masterpiece that never reached Italian theatres.” And, we should add, one that would go on to become an apparent source of inspiration for Tarkovsky’s later works like Solaris and Stalker.

From the international allure of this festival, as well as from the spirit of the 1968 movement, in February 1969 began the ongoing adventure of Cappella Underground. This “storied” film club (as defined by Marco Müller)—second in Italy only to Rome’s Filmstudio in terms of longevity among those born in a new climate of 360-degree cinephilia—was carried forward in its first twenty-year cycle by a group with an open and pragmatic outlook. The group was composed of Lorenzo Codelli (Italian correspondent for the magazine “Positif”), Sergio Grmek Germani, Mario de Luyk, Sergio Crechici, Cesare Picotti, Piero Percavassi, Annamaria Percavassi, and Rosella Pisciotta. The latter were women of remarkable personality and tenacity who were able to cement this talented team for a long time, ensuring continuity and quality for what became a symbol of cinema in Trieste.

The Cappella, in addition to chronicling the growth of contemporary New Hollywood, also looked beyond borders, organizing retrospectives on Hungarian and Czechoslovak cinema, as well as one on New Yugoslav cinema and on Dušan Makavejev in 1971, the year of his famous W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism featuring the iconic Milena Dravić. And it was the Cappella organizers who, in 1981, brought the debut film of one Emir Kusturica—Do You Remember Dolly Bell?—to the attention of the Venice Film Festival selectors.

In April 1974, none other than Francis Ford Coppola visited Cappella Underground to meet the Triestine audience while filming The Godfather Part II at the old Fish Market, which had been transformed into New York’s Ellis Island. This film is a prime example of how Trieste’s photogenic qualities, diverse landscapes, architectural styles, and nondescript urban environment can be morphed into images of various other cities. Truly the world in one city. Thus, Trieste would later appear as Vienna—whose atmosphere transpires naturally in this once key port of the Habsburg Monarchy—or Paris, Florence and Rome in recent Netflix series, while in earlier years, in B-movie Eurospy films shot at the Ceria studios, it stood in for cities like Barcelona, Istanbul and Stockholm.

However, in the early 1980s, both the Cappella and the Science Fiction Film Festival faced crises due to the city’s political shift towards autonomy, which showed little interest in cinematic culture. The Cappella had to leave its historic venue on Via Franca, and the Science Fiction Film Festival lost support from the Tourism Board. New strategies were needed, and in 1983, the Cappella proposed to take over the science fiction festival, seeking support through a conference with Italy’s leading cinema experts. During this event, Bruno De Marchi, a respected Triestine academic and critic, suggested instead a festival focused on Central European cinema, a concept more aligned with Trieste’s identity.

This idea led to the establishment, in the late Eighties, of the Alpe Adria Cinema Meetings and subsequently the Trieste Film Festival, which arose from the ashes of the Cappella’s initial phase, marking an aspect of its protagonists’ diaspora towards new realities. Annamaria Percavassi focused on developing Alpe Adria, while Piero Percavassi and Mario de Luyk launched the new art-house management of the Ariston cinema with its Festival dei Festival (a Festival of Festivals). Rosella Pisciotta and Cesare Picotti founded the Teatro Miela in the former Casa del lavoratore portuale (dock workers’ house), a space once utilized by Cosulich and Kezich in the post-war period.

The foresight of launching a Central European cinema festival proved prescient with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Moreover, the 1980s were a decade where traditional auteur cinema, questioning the meaning of life and history, flourished in Central Europe. The iconic Eighties: a decade that began with the New German Cinema and concluded with Kieslowski’s Decalogue.

But the decade’s end was also marked by Wim Wenders’s return to Europe with Wings of Desire, where Trieste is mentioned among the cities visited by the angel Peter Falk, aligning with other fleeting and mysterious citations of Trieste in auteur cinema, like scattered pieces of an enigmatic kaleidoscope. The Eighties also marked a resurgence in symbolic, cultural, and esoteric discussions of Trieste in Europe, particularly following the publication of Claudio Magris’s essay “Trieste. Un’identità di frontiera” (Trieste: A Border Identity) in 1982.

In 1983, France saw the release of a monographic issue of the “Critique” magazine titled Les mysteres de Trieste (The mysteries of Trieste), and, inspired by Italo Calvino, Daniele Del Giudice’s novel Lo stadio di Wimbledon (Wimbledon Stadium) on the enigmatic Triestine intellectual Bobi Bazlen was published. The novel would be adapted into a film by French director Mathieu Amalric in 2000 as the first production of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Film Commission, establishing an organic presence of film sets in the city. Furthermore, in 1985, Paris’s Centre Pompidou hosted a grand cultural tribute to the city, Trouver Trieste (Finding Trieste), with a cinema section titled Un regard retrouvé (A look rediscovered).

Finding Trieste: a fitting concept indeed. And a game that can be played in the ever mysterious creases of auteur cinema: not just in Wenders, but even on a train station departure board in Orson Welles’s Confidential Report (a.k.a. Mr. Arkadin), the poster of a ship in The Hudsucker Proxy by the Coen brothers, all the way to the recent Tenet by Christopher Nolan. Rather than the world in a city, Trieste becomes thus a city in the world, indelibly etched in the memory of various auteurs, be it for historical, cinematic or other reasons.

We thus get to the final observations. Not only is Alpe Adria Cinema the first entirely Triestine festival in terms of concept and organization, but it has also always been female-driven, from Annamaria Percavassi to current director Nicoletta Romeo. And it’s this festival that likely spurred the creation of the Latin American Film Festival, of Maremetraggio (today, ShorTS International Film Festival), I 1000 occhi with Sergio Grmek Germani, and of Science+Fiction, which picked up the torch of the Science Fiction Film Festival under Massimiliano Spanu and Daniele Terzoli, representatives of the new generation of Cappella Underground.

In the 2000s, despite losing the Regional Film Archive, Trieste gained Casa del Cinema (House of Cinema), one of the most significant film culture centres in Italy, thanks to Maria Teresa Poropat, the last president of the Trieste Province. This association houses all the festival offices in the same building (the above-mentioned former Casa del lavoratore portuale) where Kezich’s and Cosulich’s cinephilic adventure began.

Today, while Kezich and Cosulich are no longer with us, “Il Piccolo” boasts not only an impressive number of film critics, but also the highest rate of female film critics in Italy, including Cristina Borsatti, Elisa Grando and Federica Gregori. Beatrice Fiorentino is a highly respected programmer and the first woman to direct the Venice Film Critics’ Week, while Nicoletta Romeo heads both the Trieste Film Festival and the historic Entertainment Section of the Culture and Arts Society. And speaking of female presence, the regional Film Commission has a female coordinator, Chiara Valenti Omero, while Cappella Underground is presided over by Chiara Barbo.

Finally, turning to directing, Triestine filmmaker Laura Samani, who is only in her thirties, won, in 2022, the prestigious European Film Award and the David di Donatello—the Italian equivalent of the Oscars—for European Discovery and Best New Director respectively with Small Body, an archaic fable and one of the most beautiful films about the Friulian landscape.

The first female director to win a David in this category in 25 years, Samani was trained at the Mediateca of Cappella Underground, as she never failed to point out in many interviews. Because, after all, there is always someone who will pick up the torch.

Author: Paolo Lughi