Comrade Tito and king Boudewijn

A short post in the "weird stories" category. Belgium queen Fabiola received a threatening letter, written in bad French, that accuses her of having poisened her (late) husband king Boudewijn (Baudouin for Francophones). Her motive was her husband's sexual affair with Tito in the marshal's basement in Belgrade. The author of the letter claims to have pictures of Tito and Boudewijn doing what they did and predicts that Fabiola will be shot dead on 21 June with a crossbow. The story sounds too crazy to be true, although monarchs are capable of doing incredible things.
On Brijuni, a group of beautiful islands off the Istrian coast, not far from Pula, I saw many images of Tito meeting with world leaders, kings and queens. There is, among many other things, a museum dedicated to Tito and a zoo where gifts (elephants, zebra's) from foreign guests have long outlived their masters. I took a photo of Tito prudishly shaking hands with Dutch queen Juliana, the two being watched by Juliana's husband Bernard, himself a notorious womanizer.

James Joyce in Siberia

Ireland, Croatia and literature figured in the previous post. Inevitably, James Joyce sprang to mind. When I walked around in Pula, I saw a wall plaque close to a Roman arch. It commemorates the fact that from October 1904 to early 1905 Joyce taught English to Austro-Hungarian naval officers in Pula. Joyce had wanted to go to Trieste or Zürich, but the Berlitz language school he worked for stationed him in Pula.
He seems to have disliked Pula and was burning with desire to go to Italy, or Trieste to be more precise. Joyce writes in a letter to his aunt Josephina Murray: "I am trying to move on to Italy as soon as possible as I hate this Catholic country with its hundred races and thousand languages (..). Pola is a back-of-God-speed place - a naval Siberia (..) Istria is a long boring place wedged into the Adriatic peopled by ignorant Slavs who wear little red caps and colossal breeches." (Quoted in a book with the amazing title Sentimente, Gefühle, Empfindungen: Zur Geschichte und Literatur des affektiven von 1770 bis heute.)
If Joyce had not gone to Italy, Italy would have come to him as Italy colonized Istria after World War I. Apart from that, I don't quite understand what drew him to Trieste. First of all, it was not until after the First World War that Trieste belonged to Italy. Trieste, just as Pula, belonged for centuries to the Austro-Hungarian empire. Second, if I were a writer, longing to work in Italy, I'm sure a could find a more inspiring town than Trieste. Not that I hate the place, but it's not quite like Florence or Venice. And if it was melancholy Joyce was looking for, why didn't he simply move to Zagreb?
Whatever made Joyce dislike Istria, the Croatian peninsula is hugely popular with tourists. Not without reason. The best compliment is maybe a complaint of an Italian friend of mine: "I don't like Istria. It reminds me too much of Italy."