Protestant Zurich, Catholic Lucerne

The Swiss, don't you know (I didn't until recently), are a lot more interesting than The Third Man's cuckoo-clock jibe would have us believe. As Jan Morris, whose Europe: An Intimate Journey accompanied me along with Ulysses on our little rest-cure, puts it, his fellow officers in 1945 would have welcomed the comment. It came, of course, four years later. For them, though, it would have expressed perfectly 'the sour judgment of a battle-scarred, impoverished imperial kingdom of epic suffering and performance upon an comfortable, well-heeled, chocolatey republic which hadn't done a damned thing to save civilization as we know it.'

Morris's own view doesn't stretch to the more recently uncovered extent of Switzerland's compromises in the First and Second World Wars, compromises which seem to have sprung all too easily from the ambiguous nature of its safe-haven status. The recent minaret debacle has done nothing to endear Switzerland to the rest of Europe. But in the long term, I think I share Morris's fundamental stance:

The Swiss are the one people who have given dignity to the idea of the Nation-State by turning it into a State of Nations, to my mind a model for us all. They have not compromised either their Statehood or their nationhoods. Their four languages [French, German-ish, Italian, Romansh] remain more or less unviolate, but in all their autonomous cantons the Swiss are the Swiss.

Having spent time in the Valais and central Switzerland in close succession this summer, I can appreciate a few of the differences (though we still need to go walking in the Romansh valleys further south-east). I also find it intriguing that after quite a few nasty conflicts, the more powerful Protestant cities established a modus vivendi with the Catholics, holding the fragile Nation-State together. After 1874, in fact, it was race rather than religion which threatened to tear things apart.

The gulf hadn't occurred to me until I spent more time in several different churches in democratic Zurich and patrician (but Habsburg-resistant) Lucerne. St Peter's (first picture up top) dates from the 13th century and its 16th century clock face is the largest in Europe, overlooking a very pretty square


but the greater part of the interior was remodelled in 1705. You can just about see the Hebrew lettering above the gospel text, 'legacy of the Reformers' desire to reclaim the fundamental sources of Christianity' as my guidebook says.And the plasterwork is very lovely. Then you find yourself in a Romanesque choir with some rather attractive wall painting.


Along with the equally light and airy Predigerkirche, it's my favourite of the Zurich churches. The Grossmunster and Fraumunster have distinctive towers/spires to grace the wonderful skyline, and famous glass (I prefer the Giacomettis to the Chagalls, at least closer to) but rather gloomy interiors.

Lucerne's three big churches all have their glories. You may remember from an earlier entry that I visited the Hofkirche just before Easter. This time I managed to catch up with the other two. The Jesuit effect (second picture up top, 1673) could be predicted from the big 'uns in Rome and a regular haunt in Vienna. That extravagance lines the Reuss


and its neighbour is very different, the Italianate Renaissance Rittersche Palace, still the seat of the cantonal government


while the bigger and older number, the Franziskanerkirche, has its own grounds - formerly those of a large 13th century monastery - tucked away behind the Jesuitenkirche. It's much more of a jumble of styles, all intriguing.


Flags were painted on the nave walls in 1625 after the original battle-snatched standards had been removed. The painted images were twice restored, at the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries.


The outlandish mannerist pulpit is by Niklaus Geisler of Schweinfurt and dates from 1628.


A final flourish comes from the late 17th century plasterwork angels of the north chapels.


It was an exhilarating if exhausting afternoon, temperatures rising fast: the grey, humid pall hanging over the start of the holiday had lifted by noon as the four-day heatwave began. So we found it a bit of a sweat doing the circuit of the town walls


but worth it for the views over city (including the KKL, home to our stupendous Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Abbado experiences) and lake from the top of the Schirmerturm.

Winckelmann in Trieste

The name won't mean much even to the few tourists who visit the loveliest corner of Trieste - and there were none on the morning we wandered around in the baking sun puzzling out how to find the entrance to the Museo Civico which lodges the Winckelmann Memorial


in its Lapidary Garden.


So what does Johann Winckelmann mean to me? Really not much more than a name, somewhat mocked in Richard Jenkyns's The Victorians and Ancient Greece for his dogged insistence that Greek art was all 'noble simplicity and calm grandeur' and his 'peeping Tom' view of the original Athenian gymnasiums with their naked youths as an education in 'the beauty of forms'. Walter Pater pinpointed Winckelmann's partial view when he declared that 'the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture, but loses sight of the sombre world against which it strikes.'

Alas for Winckelmann, the 'sombre world' did for him after only eight days in Trieste, when the young Italian he'd taken up with murdered him. Troubled rent-boy or thief pure and simple? We'll never know, though Winckelmann's homoerotic dithyrambs sugges the former. Anyway, according to Jan Morris in my current bible, 'all educated Europe, we are told, was saddened by the news of his death - "universal mourning and lamentation", Goethe wrote'. The cenatoph, Morris adds, was 'erected under the patronage of an emperor, three kings and a grand duke,



containing a fine marble image of Dr Winckelmann and sundry examples of the busts, torsos, thoughtful muses and fragrant heroes of his enthusiasms'. Eheu, fugaces.




There are some fine sculptural fragments around the Lapidary Garden, too, including this fragment, one of three from the nearby site of Aquileia which we must visit next time.


And the Museum proper is charming, obviously benefitting from a recent injection of cash and proud of the Egyptian collection assembled by a couple of distinguished Triestine archaeologists. It's not at odds with the memorial strain here to feature four very handsome canopic jars, those mysterious god-as-animal-headed containers for the intestines:





All these pictures: maybe we need Debussy's 'Canope' from the second book of Preludes to absorb them by. I'd choose Zimerman if pressed, but as I have his Preludes on the shelves, let's hear great Gieseking.



By pure serendipity, I've just discovered that 'Canope' is also among the selected preludes on a 1967 Richter recital disc for which I'm just about to write the notes. And apart from the Festival Hall hackers and coughers, it's spellbinding.

Just two more items from an absorbing collection, which we didn't have time enough to see at length before the museum shut at noon. Here's the rim of a funeral jar from one of the prehistoric sites of the local Castellieri civilization up in the karst


and the museum's real treasure, though not from around here: a fifth century BC rhyton from Tarentum.


All these aides memoires I needed, by the way, because they didn't have any postcards, and even the guide book was sold out. A shame: it's a wonderful little museum and I'd like to have known more about its collectors.

Triestine temples

That's to say, of worship, commerce, consumerism, refreshment and feline sanctuary. Where better to start than the west front of Trieste's Duomo on the hill and down to the synagogue, one of the biggest in Europe and flamboyantly constructed in 1910?

Ancient Trieste plays little part in Jan Morris's inspirational meditation on city and self because, as she fairly says, 'I long ago conceived my own idea of this city's real purpose', and that essentially begins with Maria Theresa's Hapsburgian free port. The Romans do of course briefly come into it, because Mussolini's Fascists made quite certain to draw parallels with their own regime, restoring the forum in front of the cathedral and plonking their giant headquarters bang opposite the similarly reconstructed Roman theatre. Most Triestine's favourite ancient sight is the misleadingly called the Arco di Riccardo - but the Lionheart never was confined here, apparently - put up to honour Augustus in 33 AD.


Anyway, since Morris doesn't purport to be a guidebook, you won't learn from her that the Duomo boasts, either side of its hideous 1930s-decorated chancel apse, two of the loveliest old mosaics in Italy. This one, from the 13th century, depicts Christ flanked by one of Trieste's two resident Saints, Giusto, drowned in the bay with a lead weight attached to his neck, and St. Servulus.


Note the fabulously pretty decorated border, especially the bit beneath Christ's dove-refreshed feet:


Like everything else in Trieste, the Duomo is a bit of this, a bit of that. Essentially its Byzantine pillars are fine and its atmosphere, at least when we visited on a warm evening, very peaceful (oh dear, yes, the word everyone writes in church visitors' books, but isn't it what many of us agnostics want from a space like this?)


There's a chapel with a tomb for the last of the Spanish pretenders - the Carlists were here - and an eccentric bit of 20th century composite work on the west front, incorporating - rather brilliantly, I think - six busts from a Roman tomb, three on either side of the entrance.


Winckelmann's monument next door I'd better save for another entry: its surrounding sculpture garden is surely the most enchanting corner in all Trieste.

And what of the synagogue? It holds itself proudly, not hidden away as it would be in other cities, symbol of an unusually proud and happy diaspora, an invaluable mercantile input, for 150 years.



Sadly, a civic committee which tried to get them all out to Palestine in the early 1930s went unheeded by many, and 700 were deported and/or killed. But there's now a thriving Jewish community in Trieste which helps to keep the massive synagogue going (and millions must have been spent on the restoration, which looks as new). A Greek congregation also packs out the Church of San Nicolo on Sunday mornings, a favourite ritual for James Joyce to attend when he was here. We popped in briefly on our way to the station, but the previous day we'd inspected and been made very welcome by the attendant.


Within a couple of hundred yards there's also the Serbian Orthodox church of San Spiridione and the neoclassical Sant'Antonio, another thriving hub of worship when we visited and closing the view up the Canal Grande.


We broke up our tour of this part of town with a coffee and tramezzini in one of Trieste's two most celebrated cafes, the Tommaseo.


It's the earlier of two major irredentist haunts and named after the celebrated patriot who launched many of his most impassioned speeches here.



Despite the presence of a few old locals here, I much preferred the darker haven of the Cafe San Marco just around the corner from the synagogue (many of whose worshippers were welcome here).


It was opened in 1914, burnt down in an anti-Austrian protest and now retains its atmosphere, again a little bit for tourists but mostly for the residents, who enjoy film shows and concerts in one of its long halls.


The San Marco feels very Viennese, partly by virtue of the Klimtian gilding but also because of the celebration of world theatre in its little round panels.



Svevo and Joyce both loved it, and so did I.

A quick whizz, then, through other churches of sorts: mercantile splendour


furs with reflected art nouveau extravagance in the heart of the shopping district


and finally sanctuary for the city's enormous cat population. We saw a number of little old ladies, one very elegantly dressed in twinset and pearls, putting out lavish fish and pasta suppers in bowls. In the courtyard of the huge old Hapsburgian hospital, still in run-down use, numerous shelters have been made for the feline inhabitants - do they keep the mouse and rat population down, I wonder? - and food is never short.


And this complacent puss was to be seen night and day basking beneath his protector's shrine high on the hill every time we walked past.


Morris has got it exactly right, I think: 'in Trieste animals are rarely scared of humans, to my mind a sure sign of civic integrity, come wealth or poverty, fame or ignominy, empire or dictatorship or Autonomous Region'. Brava.