With the series Bitter Spirits, I crossed a territory of care: these stories were born as an experiment in self-therapy of trauma through storytelling, through dialogue with family ghosts, a few fictional characters, and historical figures of varying fame.
It was a nocturnal journey—necessary, at times painful—whose stake was one thing only: to become inhabitable to myself again.
The Tarot card of The World, to which this epilogue is dedicated, does not truly close anything. It recomposes. It integrates. It sets things back into circulation.
For this reason, The World in a City is not an ending, but a passage: it holds together what has been completed and what is about to begin.
Trieste—a border city, a free port, a barzakh between languages, empires, the living and the dead—becomes here the concrete place where a new posture can be assumed, and where the work on trauma as an inner descent gives way to travel in the world, understood as an encounter with alterity.
From this threshold begins the next series, dedicated to (De)colonial Travel Diaries: narratives of research, movement, encounters, and clashes.
If Bitter Spirits was an act of survival, this episode does not symbolize a definitive healing, but a recovered direction.
Not the end of the journey, but the moment of departure—the moment in which one begins again to cross the world with a new gaze.
Previous episode: Episode 21: Spitting on Carl Schmitt
The green light for the research mission to Trieste arrives seventeen minutes before the deadline.
There isn’t even time to curse the inefficiency of academic bureaucracy in all the languages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: I close my laptop, shove it into my backpack along with a notebook, a scarf, and four changes of clothes, and run to catch a bus.
The journey is long— as it usually is when you’re running without knowing whether you’re truly authorized to do so.
The bus window turns into a mirror, reflecting my face and half of the Po Valley: gray, boundless. Half-asleep, I hear only the engine’s voice and the echo of my own thoughts:
“Who authorizes you to live the way you want, Margherita?”
The bus accumulates so many hours of delay that I arrive in Trieste in the middle of the night.
The city sleeps, but the wind does not. I climb toward San Giusto with the Bora’s drool licking the back of my neck and my breath short from too many stairs—as if Trieste itself were already checking whether I have the right to enter.
I open the door of my B&B, on the fifth floor of a former apartment from another century (no elevator, ça va sans dire), and collapse into sleep.
The next morning I try to track down the South African sangoma I had come for. No response. They are probably already in Slovenia, and I realize that bureaucratic hesitation has been fatal.
The city gives me back only a gray sky and a fine rain that wraps everything in the silence of an abandoned station. I walk without purpose, getting lost among lopsided squares, Habsburg buildings with drawn curtains, and the sea muttering low, like an old man under morphine.
When the rain intensifies, I take shelter in the Central European Postal and Telegraph Museum—a place that feels perfect for waiting for a message that never arrives.
The rooms smell of paper, metal, and the melancholy of letters never sent. I move quietly, until something in the dim light catches my attention: a sign reads Temporary Exhibition — Vlad Țepeș, the Bloodthirsty Voivode.
I go in.
I wave my arms to get the attention of the guide, an elderly man with a cane and two eyes as gray as the sky, staring toward the wall—but then I finally realize: they see nothing.
For a moment I am stunned, thinking: who on earth put a blind man in charge of a visual exhibition?
Then he lifts his face toward me, as if he had read the question in my thoughts.
— “Would you like me to show you what cannot be seen?”
I freeze, mumbling something uncertain.
He smiles faintly—or perhaps it’s just a reflection of the neon lights—and adds:
— “Then sit down, Doctor. But you must promise me one thing.”
— “What?”
— “Never again confuse history with current affairs. The first is made of blood. The second, of reports.”
He rests his hands on the cane and leans forward slightly, like a blind priest officiating a secret mass.
— “Shall I tell you the true bloody history of Trieste? Not the one about the Carpathian vampires—no need to go that far. Ours: emperors, irredentists, patriots, administrators, officials who sucked life from stamped papers—does that interest you?”
Of course, I say yes.
And in that instant, the room fills with a thin wind that smells of iron and salt. The display cases tremble.
On the walls, the maps of the Empire seem to move.
The blind man laughs softly, as if he had just opened the door for me to the barzakh—the in-between place between this world and the next, where the living and the dead exchange postal addresses.
The old man tilts his head to one side, as if peering into his own memories.
“First of all,” he says, “Trieste was not born by human will, but by the whim of the sea. A fortress built to protect a natural harbor—so deep a symbiosis that it is impossible to tell whether the city takes its name from the port, or the port from the city.
Roman Tergeste was once great—the theater proves it—but in the Middle Ages it had shrunk into a village of fishermen and salt merchants, wedged between rock and bora, too poor to compete with Venice and too stubborn to surrender.
So it swore loyalty to the Habsburgs—not out of love, but for freedom. Because it is better to serve a distant emperor than a nearby doge.”
He smiles, and his face lights up like a harbor at dawn.
“And thus began the long golden age. When Empress Maria Theresa declared it a free port of the Empire, Trieste discovered that prosperity is born of mixing, not dividing. Slovenians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Turks, Englishmen, Muslims, Protestants… all with their languages, their saints, and their debts, but without borders.
Here people prayed in six languages and cursed in seven. It was the true capital of modernity, the southernmost city of Central Europe: an orderly bazaar, a Babylon accustomed to invoices in triplicate.”
Then his voice darkens.
“But every port is a border, and every border, sooner or later, bleeds. In 1914 the body of Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrived in Trieste, assassinated in Sarajevo.
They say the horses pulling the funeral carriage stamped their hooves as if they had smelled History. From here the first platoons departed for war—and so, from here, began the end of the Habsburg world.”
He gestures broadly, toward a horizon only he can see.
“After the Great War, the city lost its plural soul. Every language became suspect, every accent a crime. The Kingdom of Italy claimed victory, but Trieste had lost itself.
Then came twenty years of fascism, with parades, promises, new flags on ancient walls. The Duce chose Trieste—perhaps out of sheer cruelty—to announce the racial laws, on that grim September 19th, 1938.
And then, worse still, came the Gestapo, with its commander Odilo Globočnik—a name that sounds like a hammer striking the heart. It was he who turned the Risiera di San Sabba into a death camp, the only one in Italy. The furnace smoked even when it rained. And here, rain is never in short supply.”
He pauses and draws a long breath, as if memory itself were painful to his lungs.
“After the Nazis came the Partisans of Tito, and with them forty days of revenge. One didn’t need to be a fascist to end up in the foibe: a single denunciation, an error on a registry, was enough. Alongside the Partisans came the New Zealanders—yes, them, from the other side of the world—trying to separate the living from the dead, or at least attempting to.
At the end of the Second World Slaughter, Trieste became a Free Territory—but free from whom? From itself. An experiment in autonomy that collapsed the moment the world split into East and West. And once again the city found itself staring through a window without glass, at the sea and at the wall.”
The old man falls silent for a long moment. Outside, the rain taps against the museum windows like fingers searching for a Morse alphabet. Then he adds, more softly:
“Trieste has had too many masters and no single culprit. But border cities do not die: they evaporate, like spirits of salt. Today we are an old city, yes—but also a gentle ghost that teaches the living what it means to endure always, to endure with grace.”
He turns toward me, and though he cannot see me, I feel observed to the core.
“You came here looking for sangoma, Doctor, if I understand correctly? Then let me tell you this: Trieste is the greatest shaman in Europe. It has known every god, lost every war, and continues to heal by speaking with the dead. Would you like to know its secret?”
I nod, without speaking. He smiles.
“It is a barzakh city—a place in between. Neither East nor West, neither alive nor dead, neither pure nor contaminated. Here everything touches without merging, everything mixes without confusion. Just like in us: between body and soul, between law and freedom, between memory and the future. Whoever understands Trieste, understands themselves.”
The old man remains silent for a long time. The rain has softened, almost into a breath.
Then, without turning his head, he says:
“Do you know what has always fascinated me about Trieste? It is not a city that decides who you are. It forces you to decide for yourself.”
He walks slowly toward the door, tapping the floor with his cane as if reading the stone’s memory in Braille. I follow him. Outside, the air smells of iron and sea. The city, wrapped in fog, seems built more of clairvoyance than of walls.
“You know, Doctor,” he continues, standing on the threshold, “I am someone who spent his life crossing borders. I crossed them all: of language, of faith, of flesh. Each time I thought I had found a home, but it was only another threshold.”
I look at him more closely.
There is something in the way he pronounces his r’s—an echo of imperfect English, like sand between the teeth. Beneath the dark scarf I glimpse an old tie, patterned with faded Arabic designs.
“In Damascus they called me al-Burtun,” he says suddenly, “the man who dreamed in two languages and cursed in three. In India, Hazrat Abdullah, because I had the habit of believing that God does not speak only Arabic.
In Medina they would have cut off my head, had they recognized me. In London they took away my post, because they didn’t know what to do with an Englishman who prayed toward the southeast.
So I came here.”
I stop short, eyes wide.
He smiles. A wide, mocking, unmistakable smile.
“In person—or at least in shadow. After translating all the forbidden books, where did you expect me to end up? In paradise?
No, of course: at the post office. Trieste is a paradise for translators: no one speaks the same language, but everyone understands enough to trade. And to think that when they sent me here from Damascus, I took it as a punishment.”
The bora hits us full on, like a maritime laugh. He adjusts his coat, leaning on the cane like a comrade-in-arms.
“You see, Doctor, to play the role of barzakh means this: to be a place where worlds brush against each other without fusing. And this is not compromise—it is a truce. Empires, languages, creeds: here everything is border and everything is passage. Even death. Look at mine: it was not an end, but a service frontier.”
We walk together toward the sea, while the streets shine with rain like silver veins. Each streetlamp casts two shadows: mine and his. On the Molo Audace, the wind whistles like an off-key muezzin. Below us, the sea is living lead.
Burton stops, lifts his face toward the open space we call sky.
“You know, Margherita, borders are not evil. They exist to remind you that you are entering another language. But those who mistake them for walls condemn themselves to speaking only to themselves.”
He extends his hand to me, cold as gravestone marble.
“That’s what you wanted to understand, isn’t it? That the world only ends when you stop crossing it.”
The fog thickens. A golden reflection wraps around him, then dissolves like a page being turned.
Only his voice remains, floating, full of sea:
“My friend, I was never a saint nor a hero. Just an interpreter of chaos. But if you ever have to choose between the border and command, always choose the border. There, at least, the world still speaks all its languages.”
And when the fog parts, only his cane remains, abandoned on the railing.
Below, the sea of Trieste—vast, dark, ambiguous.
The wind suddenly dies down, as if even the bora had finished speaking.
I walk for a while without direction, with the feeling that the city is holding its breath along with me. Every stone seems to guard a word it does not dare pronounce.
And just when I think the day is over—that the old Burton, the fog, and my own exhaustion have been oracle enough—I notice a half-torn poster on the wall of an old building:
“Halloween Night at the Astronomical Observatory – Guided Visit.”
I smile to myself: after visiting the psychiatric ward of the Moon, what could a conversation with a group of costumed astrophysicists possibly be?
So I start uphill again, toward the hill of San Giusto. The rain has finally stopped, and Trieste, under the electric evening light, looks like a map trying to remember its own design.
At the entrance of the observatory we are greeted by a group of volunteers in silver cloaks and wizard hats; I spot an Empress Maria Theresa wrapped in velvet, and Margherita Hack laughing in a corner, while her name is mentioned again and again by her students and heirs.
Inside, the air of the observatory is dense with humidity and electronic incense. We climb a spiral staircase smelling of iron and centuries-old dust, up to the dome.
There we are met by the selenographer Johann Krieger himself—or at least a remarkably convincing version of him: neatly trimmed beard, brown suit, a small leather-bound notebook in his pocket, and in his face the gaze of someone who spent a lifetime staring into darkness in search of light.
When he sees him, a child opens his mouth wide and asks his mother if this is “all real”—to which she replies, very seriously: “Shhh… who knows? Just listen to him.”
The guide—or the shadow—begins to speak in a voice that is steady and dreamlike at once, telling us how he built Trieste’s first observatory:
“I am Johann Nepomuk Krieger, selenographer. I drew the Moon back when it was still impossible to take sharp photographs. I spent my nights at the telescope, right here, trying to understand whether its craters were scars or alphabets.”
He shows us some of his maps, scattered across the wall: silvery lines emerging from the dark like veins in a lunar body. As he does, he tells us that every observatory is a confessional, and every astronomer a visionary.
“To look at the Moon,” he continues, “means admitting that we will never know whether the light it returns to us is still alive or already dead. It is like loving someone through a letter that travels for too long. When it arrives, you don’t know whether it speaks of a past already gone or of a future still to come.”
The same child raises his hand again and insists: “But are you real or fake?”
Krieger looks at him—or perhaps pretends to—and smiles.
“I am as real as the Moon. Like her, I reflect the light of others.”
Someone laughs softly, someone else is moved. Outside, the sky opens to a fragment of silver, and for a moment the Moon appears between the clouds like an eye that does not judge, but remembers.
Krieger rests a hand on the telescope and concludes:
“Trieste is a city that looks at two infinities: the sea and the sky. I chose the second, but in the end they are the same thing. Both change shape, and neither belongs to those who observe them.”
The child is the first to applaud, then everyone follows. I linger a moment behind, watching the reflection of the Moon tremble on the telescope’s lens, and I think of Burton, of the barzakh, and of all the borders I crossed to get here.
And I understand that the real world—the one where the living and the dead, the visible and the imagined, mingle—may be exactly this: a harbor that speaks two languages, a city suspended between sea and Moon, a place where the journey does not end, it simply changes direction.
Three days later, Trieste walks me to the station like an old lover who cannot hide her sorrow.
The sky is such a perfect blue it feels deliberately chosen to keep anyone from leaving. I walk slowly along the platform, dragging my suitcase like a gentle penance.
The city around me breathes the clear morning air: domes, signs in three languages, the sea glimpsed between buildings, as if calling you by name.
I know I will miss her.
I will miss her composed melancholy, her courage to remain at the borders, her triple and plural voice, which does not ask to be understood but only to be listened to. Among the dowagers of empires long dead, Trieste is the most alive city I have ever seen—and the most mortal among the living.
And perhaps that is why it is impossible not to love her.
When the train starts moving, I rest my forehead against the window. The bora slams against the glass in protest, as if telling me:
“No one ever truly leaves a free port, my child. We cling to you like salt.”
The landscape slides by: the sea recedes, the hills flatten into plain. And just as I realize that this farewell is weighing on me more than I expected, my phone lights up with a new email notification.
Sender: K.
Subject: MSCA — urgent update.
I open it. “The project may proceed, provided that a new, reliable South African supervisor is identified. We invite you to move forward without delay.”
I smile.
Outside the window, a blade of sunlight cuts through the clouds above the Karst. It is the message I had been waiting for.
I laugh softly to myself, as if someone—perhaps old Burton, perhaps the city itself—had just winked at me. I close the laptop, press my notebook to my knees, and murmur:
“At last, World: here we go again.”