John Earle

I knew John. He was very pro-Tito and contemptuous about the Italian Christian Democrats, whom he covered for many a long year in Rome. He retired to Trieste because of connections going back to his time there in 1945. But he was scathing about Trieste too. This is what he said to the local newspaper Il Piccolo in 2011: 

“Where is Trieste going? [Jan] Morris has found a ‘sense of nowhere’. I fear that the city has been sucked into nothingness, disappeared from maps, is reduced to the furthest perimeters, an ‘island which does not exist’. I see the half-empty port and I say: ‘it has changed little since that day of the departure of the German guns in 1945’. 

“The Italian railways no longer want to invest further east than Mestre...  Ljubljana is only eighty kilometres distant and I would gladly go there, but how? I have a sister-in-law in Vienna but there are no more trains. Just the platforms, constructed by Austria, not by Italy... 

“Trieste was given to Italy in 1918 but Italy did not want it. There were already Genoa, Livorno, Naples and Venice. So Trieste became a periphery, after having been the outlet of an empire. 

“But try this old Scotch whisky. Just a finger. Just to warm up the atmosphere.” ■