EN
The article focuses on several aspects of Trieste: its ethnic and cultural hybridity, Central-Europeanism and modernity. The mindset is roughly determined by the so called humanistic geography and the author emphasizes in particular the value of place/ topography, which shape the nature of culture. The analysis of the novels Senilita by Italo Svevo and Altro mare by Claudio Magris, which closes the article, brings out the aporia of modernity. According to literary historians it is Italo Svevo together with Trieste as a model of the twentieth-century urban culture that open modernity in Italian literature.