The car was bought shortly after the Twin Towers collapsed. And it smells like it. I fit my luggage in the cramped backseat, stick the folded fishing rod behind the front seats and lower myself into my spot, riding shotgun. I wear a baseball hat, not to fit the part of the fisherman, but because the upholstery of the Mini that detached years ago—sagging like the collapsed ceiling of a dilapidated theatre—is tickling the top of my head. I scoot lower to take in the view, drenched with green and history, as we head east.
Gliding through the autostrada, the highway to Trieste, our attention is diverted towards the famed lagoon. For us literary types (the man clutching the wheel and donning a stylish flat cap, Gianni Dubbini, is a writer as well) it’s impossible to gaze at these swampy waters without thinking of Ernest Hemingway.
The opening chapters of Across the River and into the Trees describe Colonel Richard Cantwell duck hunting in the Marano Lagoon. Hemingway arrived in Venice by chance in 1948 with his fourth wife, when his ship bound for Cannes had to stop in Liguria for technical reasons. He had had a 10-year writing block and longed for the Veneto of his war-time youth, 30 years before. This became his sanctuary: hunting parties, drunken evenings at Harry’s Bar, Lucullan lunches in the local osterie—so much alcoholic fun that writing became impossible. Hence his retreat to Torcello, the Byzantine island in the northern lagoon we can almost glimpse from the Mini Cooper.
From the top of the basilica Hemingway could see Fossalta, where he was stationed as an 18-year-old ambulance driver in World War I. “I’m a boy of the Lower Piave…” he had written to a friend, “I’m an old fanatic of the Veneto and I will leave my heart here.” He did leave a few pints of blood on this soil as, in 1918, he was wounded on the Piave River, which we now cross, not too far from the famous Isonzo battles that claimed 300,000 Italian lives and 30,000 ethnic Slovenian, who had fought against them on a 60-mile front from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea.
These are the rivers, I Fiumi, described by poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. These are the massacres immortalised by Curzio Malaparte in La rivolta dei santi maledetti, a scathing indictment of dreadful Italian mistakes, censored by the state until 1980. These are the natural frontiers you cross on an autostrada without noticing, unless you know what to look for. This journey will be about literature, history, borders and battles, but also something more profound, hiding deep inside a river. In Hemingway’s case, and in his time, it was always about killing. In our case, and in our times (for now, at least), it is about releasing.
Palmanova appears on the right: the star-shaped fort the Venetian Republic built in the late Renaissance, still perfect from the air, invisible from the road. We leave Trieste to the south, heading towards the border town of Gorizia, or Nova Gorica in Slovenian. These lands, now in the region of Friuli, have been painted in vibrant colours in the pages of Jan Morris and Claudio Magris. When he first arrived here in 1945, James Morris was a young, male British soldier. She returned as an elderly woman decades later, armed with a gifted pen labelling Trieste as “the capital of nowhere,” a border city frequented by James Joyce and Italo Svevo, a port whose very name connotes “the visceral, the surreal, the lonely, the hypochondriac, the self-centred and the affectionate”. I remember crossing this frontier as a young man with my girlfriend in a battered Fiat, into a Yugoslavia that smelled of spaghetti with marmalade and communist suspicion.
Trieste has always been a city between worlds, linking Vienna to the Mediterranean port of the Habsburg Empire, a gateway to our journey, the home of Claudio Magris, philosopher of the same threshold and Meistersinger of Mitteleuropa. His emphasis of the non-national legacy of these lands is an inspiration to cosmopolitans like Gianni and me—a strategy of resistance against authoritarian regimes, the allure of easy nostalgia, the surrender to the past. Magris’ book Microcosms describing the limestone plateau of the Carso, between Trieste and Gorizia, reads like a meditation on what it means to live on the edge of different worlds.
After the Great War of 1915-18, Gorizia fell to the Kingdom of Italy, but in 1947, after World War II, the city was divided. The east went to communist Yugoslavia, the Isonzo River which used to be a unifying element, became a hard border until Slovenia joined the Schengen Agreement in 2007. The city even has its own version of the Berlin Wall, the ‘Wall of Gorizia’. On one side, Nova Gorica was rebuilt by a Slovenian student of Le Corbusier and showcased Tito’s socialism. On the western side, the contrast with baroque Gorizia couldn’t be greater.
The dark subtext that cannot be avoided is that in May 1945, more than a thousand people (half of them Fascist military police, more than 100 Slovenians accused of collaboration and more than 300 Italian civilians) were arrested and executed by Yugoslav Partisans in what is known as the foibe, karst sinkholes of this limestone landscape where the corpses were thrown, a topic instrumentalised by the right in Italy and never honestly reckoned with by the left—a wound still bleeding in today’s politics. Dead bodies rest under the picturesque landscape, the disquieting buried under the normalised. Genocide, again, asphalted by real estate plans.
The Trottas hailed from here. Joseph Roth’s great novel The Radetzky March— the elegy that defined how an entire civilisation understood its own collapse— traces three generations of a family of soldiers and bureaucrats of Slovenian origin, whose ancestor settled in Sipolje, not far south of the road we are now driving. They were the Habsburg Empire’s most loyal servants: foot-soldiers of a system that never quite considered them its heart. When the empire fell, their land was divided between Mussolini’s Italy and Tito’s Yugoslavia, and they were forgotten by history, visible now only through the emerald water of the rivers ahead, and the marble trout waiting in the Sava River currents.
Mount Nero on the Karst plateau where the Second Battle of the Isonzo in 1915 saw fierce handto-hand combat between Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops (Photo: Getty Images)
Roth himself was a man formed entirely by margins. Born in 1894 in Brody, a Jewish town in Galicia near the Russian border, he wrote in German, converted to Catholicism more as political defiance than spiritual conviction, and became the star feature writer. He defined his own métier with characteristic precision: “I paint the portrait of the age. I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist; I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.” A manifesto Gianni and I happily embrace as the Mini Cooper glides into Slovenia.
The day Hitler came to power in January 1933, Roth boarded a train from Berlin to Paris and never returned. He wrote to Stefan Zweig: “Hell reigns. Do not fool yourself.” He spent his final years in Paris hotels, writing at café tables, drinking himself to death. He died in 1939. His gravestone reads: Écrivain autrichien—mort à Paris en exil. The story of the Trottas ends, in the sequel The Emperor’s Tomb, fittingly, with the last Trotta standing before the locked door of the Habsburg crypt in Vienna, asking: “Where shall I go now, I, a Trotta?” It is a question this landscape has been asking, in different languages, ever since.
None of this is visible in today’s Bled, Slovenia’s premier Alpine resort destination, one of the most enchantingly located towns in all of Europe, tucked around the eastern end of the lake and overlooked to the north, east, and west by majestically snow-topped Julian Alps. Here I feel compelled to sing the praises of over-tourism, forcing our small car into a tedious queue, just to reach the Fauna Fly fishing shop before heading to our hotel in nearby Ribno.
Yes, the stench from exhaust pipes of fuel over-priced by the Iran war is unpleasant. Yes, we are boiling in the heat, engines on, inching down to the four miles road embracing the lake, a hundred feet deep, saturated by cobalt blue. But in the middle, the first unmissable Instagram shot: the rocky islet entirely occupied by a graceful, tall-steepled 17th-century church, to the right, and, up high on a rock, the walled fort is straight out of a Disney fable. Many faces of many nations, all in ice-cream licking harmony, pushing strollers, riding bicycles, smiling in the sunny afternoon. Globalisation, for all its shortcomings, has created peaceful cohabitation, fuelled by booking apps and low-budget airlines.
HERE WE ALL are, in this land formerly riddled by horror war stories: Korean tourists off a bus from Venice, Americans with their loud voices, eternally stiff Brits, plenty of Austrians and Germans who feel quite at home, as do the Serbians, Croatians, Hungarians, and the unavoidable Italians like us, heading hungrily to ‘Pizzeria Al Fresco’ to discover that the delicious pie is baked by none other than a very talented pizzaiolo originally from the Delhi area, with whom I discuss similarities between naan and the Margherita dough.
Once we reach the hotel, as I’m resting from the long drive in my room, I hear loud, nervous knocking at the door. The hotel is surrounded by a balmy spruce pine forest, gently filtering the river whose roar we can still perceive if I open the windows. It’s Gianni, from next door. His widened eyes look like he has just stuck his fingers in an electric socket, as he says: “Please slap me!”
“You won’t believe it… I forgot my gear in Venice! Please slap me hard on the face, I deserve it,” he begs.
“I’m not in favour of violence,” I say.
“I’m a jerk, I’m so stupid,” he moans.
Being 20 years his senior, I approach mistakes with more wisdom: “Gianni, you did a stupid thing, doesn’t mean you’re stupid…” Too many years in America have filled me with sugary positive reinforcement. “The solution is simple, let’s go back to Matej’s at the Fauna Fly fishing shop by the lake to rent you a fishing suit.” We are no testosterone-fuelled Hemingways, we are just awkward, self-aware and self-ironic Europeans dressed for the part.
In the shop, we run into a muscular 19-year-old Serbian boy who has ridden his bicycle 500km to come fly fishing here. His unruly mane of brown curls under a baseball hat seems too tight for his head. He is cordial and speaks perfect Netflix American. “My friends were heading for a school trip to Venice that cost 500 euros. Too expensive for me. So I decided to plan my own adventure… I might ride down to Venice afterwards anyway,” he says as he walks out of the shop with a new collection of artificial flies for his fishing line.
It’s now time to face the unavoidable. We are here to fish. All throughout our journey I have been humming the banjo tune from Deliverance—the duet between the city tourist and the local on his porch, bliss soon turning to mayhem—just to wind Gianni up. Yet, soon enough, we also take a wrong turn and are reminded quickly of the past. “Military Area, entrance forbidden” the sign blocking the way right after we cross a small bridge warns us. “Movement limited, shooting range.” Now we are properly terrified. This is not the adrenaline we were aiming for. We feel a bit like a trout hooked on the line. The fishermen getting fished.
“Quick, quick, let’s do a 3-point turn around!” I urge Gianni who hurriedly swings the wheel around, as I look out, hoping we won’t get into the crosshairs of sharp shooters. As I’ve said, we are writers, so most of it is happening in our imagination. The Mini Cooper escapes the bridge unscathed, only now noticing the ‘DO NOT ENTER’ sign we had missed.
It’s my second attempt at this practice that I master clumsily. The idea is mimesis, the fisherman trying to blend with the context of the river, wearing green, approaching the flowing waters like a cat, slow steps. Fish shouldn’t notice we place ourselves in the middle of the Sava River.
I attempt to master swinging the rod and line in the air, remembering Brad Pitt, eternally studying the current, in A River Runs through It directed in 1992 by Robert Redford, based on Norman Maclean’s novella. The only thing resembling it are Gianni’s technical suit, his peaked hat, the bright, elegant dress shirt with the upturned collar, a true Venetian gentleman, as he circles the air with nobility in his wrist swing, that fake fly buzzing in the air, closer and closer to the bubbles that indicate trout are abounding, down there in the shade.
Thomas McGuane, who wrote better about fly fishing than anyone before or since, called it “the longest silence”— those unproductive stretches that are, paradoxically, the whole point. Progress, he argued, is always towards the kinds of fishing that are never productive “in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting-and-fishing periodicals.”
The whole point is patience. Enjoying the quiet and the surroundings. Feeling the current push into the one-piece water-proof suit that begins with the boots and wraps suspenders around the shoulders. Swing that rod, make that fake fly dance in the air, back and forth, land it far away, retrieve the line as it floats on the surface, carried by the current, hope that a marble trout will fall for it and bite into the circled, barbless hook designed to leave no wound. We have paid a steep fee for a Catch & Release permit. No guarantee of a single catch.
Between spots, we run into the Serbian boy again. He asks: “How many have you caught?”
“None, yet,” we admit.
“I’ve caught five already this morning…” He pauses, looks at Gianni: “I thought you were an expert fisherman…” He’s gone full Brad Pitt on us. Then, to make things worse, he takes pity: “If you want you can join me at my spot, over there, beyond that bend.”
But Gianni’s ego is now too bruised, thanks but no thanks, we’ll seek our spots, we will get our catch. So we find our pebbly beach. Gear out, hook on, throw that line. Again and again. Wait. A van stops on the bridge above us. Two Slovenians walk out with a bucket. They pour a few kilos of live marble trout into the river, as the locals are revitalising growth this way too. Gianni is perturbed, it’s too noisy, it will scare our catch.
So we venture far from people, through the shrubs and spruce, into the water again, reaching a rocky island in the river. After much pleasant waiting in the breeze and sun, Gianni screams. “Got it!” He pulls, then hands me the arched rod so I can feel the thrill, since I’m far from catching anything today, or ever. So I coil up the yellow line until the marble trout is puffing and panting in Gianni’s fancy wooden net he bought from Matej’s shop, to hide the shame of his forgetfulness.
I feel a pinch in the heart for this creature. Creepy, dark, sinewy leeches cling to its gills and tail-normal in this cold season, when trout hide on the bottom, easy prey to parasites. I feel I should intervene by ripping out these opportunistic creatures, but it’s better not to touch it—look at it, thank it for the buzz, unhook the undamaged mouth, let it go. There will be no Hemingwayan killing today, only contemporary releasing of other forms of life with whom we played, not too traumatically. I vicariously take in Gianni’s joy, his pleasure in sharing this pastime for old men. This is also what friendship is about.
Mission accomplished: not shot at, surrounded by natural beauty, absorbing the peaceful cohabitation of people who used to cut each other’s throats with bayonets once munitions ran out. We have enjoyed hours on a river that used to be darkened with blood, now running cobalt blue to the Danube and then into the distant Black Sea, where another war is claiming lives.
This journey from Hemingway’s lagoons, through the land of Magris and Morris, into Roth’s Trotta mountains ends with a ritual that refused to kill anything. The 12 battles on the Isonzo, Gorizia cut in two, bloody foibe in the karst, a Serbian boy on his bike, a pizza chef from Delhi… we are all people on the edges of other former empires, converging on an emerald river to practise patience.
We have lived a moment in the middle of a river, then disappearing into the stream. An instant we will remember. Or at least that’s what we tell each other, as we smoke a cigar on the dark veranda of the hotel, in silence, that evening, swigging a sip of Cognac from a very fisherman-like pocket flask.