Heritage Narratives on the Slovenian Coast: The Lion and the Attic

Abstract

When one of the best-selling contemporary travel writers embarks on a ‘grand’ tour of the Mediterranean he is not only trying to evoke the tradition of elite travel that constructed the tourist Mediterranean, but seeks to recreate the literary landscape of his famous ‘predecessors’. He predictably stops in Trieste to see where Joyce wrote most of his Ulysses, where Italo Svevo created his portraits of the city, and where Sir Richard Burton was employed as a British consul. He uses Svevo as a ‘tour guide’ and is rather pleased with the city where ‘Italians were full of compliments, even here at the edge of Slovenia’ (Theroux 1995: 229).