Communicating Mobile Borders: Urban Conviviality and More-Than National Belonging in Trieste’s Interethnic Friendships

This article analyzes communicative practices of interethnic conviviality in Trieste, which make this frontier city the epitome of multiculture in Europe. My in-depth interviews with an ethnographic component explore friendships among Italians and people from neighboring ex-Yugoslav countries. Largely ignorant of official minority frameworks, they negotiate togetherness by self-identifying as Triestines, performing the city in everyday life as a cultural “marketplace”—Trieste’s ancient name—where they work out informal cooperation and joke about inherited cultural opposites (Roman/capitalist vs. Slavic/ex-socialist). In interpreting these communicative alliances, I draw analogies to Yugoslav interethnic solidarities of “raja,” where conviviality depended on both spatial proximity and the positive confrontation of difference. Trieste’s Italo-Yugo networks similarly rehearse what I term “more-than-national” or “elastic” belonging, resulting from their routine combining of embodied and digital communication as complementary forms of movement, whether through socializing in taverns and online groups or traversing nearby national borders.