Trieste - Half-real, Half-imagined

Trieste is both home and exile. Still and bustling at once. Over the years, it has offered shelter to some of the world’s finest writers and artists, to lost souls and restless seekers looking for a place that might quiet their sense of not belonging.

After a painful rupture in my personal life, I found myself splitting time between here and my hometown, Bucharest. Trieste welcomed me with the most complex Adriatic light, a thousand shades of blue, while also keeping me at a distance on certain aspects, much like fire does with campers reaching out their hands - a duality that subconsciously manifested in my photographic exploration of the place: snapshots and multiple exposures, planned or accidental.

As I understand it, in some ways, Trieste hasn’t changed: she remains an elegant bourgeois lady, carrying on with her daily rituals year after year, her hair growing whiter with time. And yet, in her perpetual historical restlessness, she also holds the soul of a teenage boy still trying to figure himself out. As Jan Morris described in her book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, this “half-real, half-imagined seaport” has become an essential stop along the way in my life’s journey.