Literary tour

“FOR TRULY, PINDEMONTE”.
The writers of Trieste and the legacy of effects.

In literature, the most famous scene set at the Trieste cemetery of Sant'Anna is almost a farce: Zeno mistakenly follows a funeral that is not that of his brother-in-law Guido.
Yet, as always in Italo Svevo's work, we laugh, wide eyed, through gritted teeth. Zeno is a Foscolo via Freud's couch. It remains that the funeral, the 'stone' with the name, the eulogy, belong to the living, and serve them. But with the awareness that, especially in the case of a writer, that performance constitutes the last chapter of the story of the self and is often rich in references to the legacy of effects - may Foscolo forgive us - that it has caused in the public.
The people of Trieste, however, are unusually restrained in dictating their final portrait. Although Svevo writes the epitaphs of his parents and siblings who precede him in death, he leaves nothing for himself to carve in stone. On the other hand, the epigraph of Svevo that Umberto Saba left us was not received in the crypt of the Veneziani family in which the novelist rests. And even in the case of his own burial, Saba, who on the one hand left us a caustic epigraph in the Canzoniere and on the other had entrusted a letter to his friend Vittorio Sereni with his wish to have some of the latter's verses as a viaticum, did not see his wish, which remained unknown to his daughter Linuccia, respected: his tombstone is engraved with his verses 'Pianse e capì per tutti' (“He wept and understood for everyone”). Even more lacking in words, almost mute, is the nearby tomb of Virgilio Giotti, which, in addition to the date of his birth and death, offers only one incisive word: 'poet'. Not to mention the stark minimalism of Anita Pittoni's sepulchre or the simplicity that marks the sepulchres of Boris Pahor, Carolus Cergoly or Julius Kugy, who rest in family tombs. Elsewhere it is a single aspect that emerges, as in the case of Giani Stuparich, whose tombstone hurriedly mentions his work as a writer and teacher and bears the full motivation for the medal for valour awarded to him in the First World War. Stelio Mattioni's grave alone offers a literary quotation, taken from the conclusion of Il richiamo di Alma: “If you love yourself, love me”.
But if the stones remain mute, the urns of strong Trieste authors speak nonetheless: they speak of complex and at times controversial confessional affiliations, which the perimeter walls of the multiethnic Trieste cemeteries divide inadequately: Svevo and Saba, different converts, rest in the Catholic one, while Giuseppe Revere, Giorgio Voghera, Giorgio Pressburger and others lie in the Jewish one and Charles Lever in the Anglican one, not far from the eternal resting place of Stanislaus Joyce, James's brother, who chose Trieste as his permanent residence. And the graves that are not there also speak: those of Fulvio Tomizza and Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, returned to their Istria, that of Scipio Slataper, left on Podgora, and that of Pia Rimini, whose life ended in Auschwitz.