The Bishop’s MeadowI park my car in front of the church, on top of the hill. This church has been destroyed and rebuilttwice from the fourteenth century, the white walls I am looking at date back to 1891. I walktoward the cemetery, this road used to have eight or nine between bars and restaurants, I recall.Now a pasta eatery and a chinese owned bar look like the only place where I could get a coffee.
I meet my mother at the cemetery, on the side of the hill overlooking the stadium. Thegravestones don’t match the poverty of the neighborhood, this used to be a farmers village untila hundred years ago, and its house made bread was awarded as best in the Austro Hungarianempire in 1756. Looking around I see statues and obelisks, white stone and flowers. She comesevery few weeks in the good season to clean our family graves, pulling the weeds. The flowersin the urn look dirty, she pull them out and starts shaking and beating them with her hands.Black coal like powder comes out, on the ground and on her hands, until the plastic imitationlooks like real flowers again.
In 1896 the Krainische Industrie Gesellschaft built a plant for the production of cast iron, on thecoast at the bottom of the hill, it has been running ever since. Walking out of the cemetery I risemy head looking west and I can see the rust colored furnace and a tiny hint of smoke from it,closer than half a mile from here. Before the war there used to be a big meadow between thevillage and the Ironworks, but with the dalmatian exiles crisis in the forties and fifties it wasdeemed necessary to house thousands of people within the already tiny area of Trieste, buildingentire new neighborhoods or filling up underpopulated areas. Now, the houses reach the veryborder of the plant on every side, as close as five hundred feet from the furnace.
The very first row of houses dates back to 1890s, they were built to house the constructionworkers coming from all over the empire to build the plant, and later for the plant workersthemselves. They have been empty and abandoned for twenty years, since the last tenant died.My mother points out a window, unsure, while having a smoke. That was the apartment whereher grand grand father Francesco used to live, a specialized worker in Ironworks in Moravia andBosnia before settling in the plant of Trieste. She recalls playing in the front courtyard and thendown in the bomb shelter, or up the meadow till the village. There used to be soccer field justnext to the houses in the sixties, the gravel was black and so were the players legs after amatch. Everyone was way more careless back then. Now the long time residents of the Bishop’sMeadow have cancer and the property value has dropped five folds. Only those who cannotafford to live anywhere else stay, the original population being slowly replaced by immigrantsfrom africa, china, eastern europe, the balkans and the middle east.
Back to the car, I recall when I used to clean my moped seat from the shiny black chrome dustthat built up overnight. The sun is set, a family is having dinner in the former pizzeria, now acheap fish eatery run by the fishermen themselves, the only customers in the whole restaurant,the only light in the street. Behind them the furnace is a silhouette in the orange summer sunset.
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