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a snake. They admire (or deplore) the specially commissioned painting, by Trieste’s own master Cesare dell’ Acqua, entitled The Proclamation of the Free Port of Trieste and tactfully honouring the origins of all this grandeur. They wonder how many of the leather-bound books in the library have actually been read, and how often anyone has sat at its purpose-built reading-chairs, with their folding bookrests, to consult Plutarch’s Life of Alexander .
    They are bemused, perhaps, by the plethora of commemorative coins, baronial crests, mementos of royal favour, images of Newton or Galileo and putatively panoramic views of the Suez Canal. They peer through the big telescope on its tripod, permanently aimed at ships in the harbour. They bow or curtsy to Signora Revoltella, who is too ancient to take part in the evening’s festivities, but has been helped down from her bedroom to greet them. They sink gratefully into the soft red-plush chairs of the saloon, and even more gratefully at last into the dining-room, its immense table laden with crested silver, Bohemian glass and china from Bavaria.
    Young Helga von Krantz whispers what a waste it seems, that the Baron should be a bachelor. Her husband the general growls that he’s a lucky fellow. The Governor chats with his host over a large cigar, urging the benefits of preferential loading tariffs. Several gentlemen are huddled in a corner, deploring the effects of preferential loading tariffs. Several ladies tell the old Signora how much they admire her Modena lace collar, and she pretends to hear them. All is normal, all is stable, all feels as enduring as the empire itself. Still, a century and more later you and I may think the most revealing thing in Baron Re-voltella’s mansion is a small gilt-framed picture we spot in a corner: for when we look closer we find that it is not a picture at all, but a camera obscura set among the canvases, enabling the billionaire to keep an eye on the piazza outside, and make sure His Highness the Admiral is not vandalized on his pedestal by louts or nationalists. The Baron knows a thing or two, and does not have complete faith in those pompous old duffers the lamparetti .
    THERE are many other places I like to go when I wish to sniff the imperial breezes. One is the railway station, southern terminal of the Sudbahn, which was the first of the lines connecting Vienna with Trieste. It is a building yellow, lofty and assured, in a mixture of classical and Renaissance modes that Habsburg Trieste particularly liked. Corinthian columns support its glass-panelled roof, sculpted women hold laurel-wreaths or engine-wheels, and there is any amount of floor-space for ceremonial welcomes. Silvio Benco, an eminent Trieste littérateur of the last fin de siècle , thought its architecture had “an athlete’s poise, grace and nobility,” and in his day, with its fashionable station restaurant and its hissing brass-bound locomotives, it must certainly have had confidence.
    Then I like to wander around the old Central Hospital, in its day so generous an institution that poor mothers in labour were given a poverty payment—direct so to speak from the Emperor, like our donation from George VI. There is a quadrangle inside it, frequented by many cats squatting around a central image of the Virgin, and there I like to fancy the great medical men of old, taking a break in their pince-nez and white coats from the morning’s consultations. Here comes Teofilo Koepl the obstetrician, deep in the latest paper on Caesarian parturitions from Vienna, and here is Arturo Menzel the chief surgeon tapping him on the shoulder to remind him about the staff meeting that evening, and importantly ignoring them both is Dr. Antonio Carlo Lorenzetti, who has no time to chat because, as everyone knows, he is also a member of the Governor’s Council, not to mention being a Cavaliere of the Order of Franz Joseph. Patients lying on their beds in the sunshine respectfully watch