Struggling for a place in the world

On the face of it, Trieste seems a quirky choice of subject for this, Jan Morris's last book. It's a city famous principally for its complete lack of distinction - Italy's equivalent of, say, Hull. The results of a 1999 survey showed that 70 per cent of Italians didn't even know Trieste was in Italy. Never mind. Before you click out of this story, on the grounds that you're never likely to visit the city, let me reassure you that you don't have to in order to love this book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere - it is, above all, a wonderfully assured meditation on place. Built by a coalition of Egyptian, German, British, Austrian, Italian, Jewish and Armenian traders, and positioned at the interstices of the Latin, Slavic and Teutonic worlds, Trieste rose briefly to prominence as the chief port of the Habsburgs before being handed to Italy after the Second World War.

In 1946, Morris, then James, arrived in Trieste as a young soldier and found a city "Italian by sovereignty but in temperament more or less alone".

After that initial visit, Morris continued to visit Trieste, pulled in by the city's "quiet decency" and "flavour of civility". Over the years Trieste became for Morris a memento mori, a place of "lost consequence and faded power," which "makes one ask sad questions of oneself ". In a city where no one really belongs, everyone belongs. The "Nation of Nowhere" is free to dream of somewhere else. James Joyce lived in Trieste while writing his homage to another place, Dubliners, and Sir Richard Burton translated One Thousand and One Nights there. It's a spot from which to look back and draw conclusions. A good place, in other words, for a swan song. And what an exquisite song this is: kind, pellucid and urbane, minutely researched and beautifully managed, without a hint of arrogance or gimmickry.

Morris understands that in any story, it is the beginning and end that count and it's the job of the middle to make them do so. Starting with her own fascination for the city, the book moves on to explore Trieste's history, architecture and cultural life before leading the reader gently to the big ideas; ideas about nationhood, identity and the business of exile. Morris is a great authority on such things. Until she "completed a change of sexual role" in the early Seventies, she was an exile in her own body.

I'm not only mentioning this because, let's face it, it's pretty fascinating, but because Morris brings it up herself. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is as subtle a piece of autobiographical writing as I have read. This isn't just a brilliant book about a place in its geographical and historical sense. It is also a very personal and moving account of Morris's own struggle for a place in the world.

This mix of the personal, the ideational and the descriptive is the essence of great travel writing, and there's precious little of it being written today. Now that travel itself is easy, almost mundane, and there are guide books for the most obscure corners of the globe, travel literature has more and more lost confidence in its own ability to resonate. Morris's quiet strength and unerring assurance is a joy in an era of joke travelogues and shaggy dog stories.

Most travel books tell you about a journey that gets you to a place. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere tells you about a place that leads you to a journey.