Trieste

Trieste, Italy's City of Mystery and Romance

In the late 1940s, Europe couldn't quite decide what to do with Trieste. Was it a Slavic outpost of Italy, or a Latin addition to Eastern Europe? For a while it could have gone either way, before the city came under Italian jurisdiction in 1954.

Trieste still has a slightly stateless feel to it. There is a sense that it could be in Croatia or Slovenia and its citizens speaking Slovenian or Serbo-Croat if it were not for the caprices of history. It is an Italian city with an Adriatic rather than a Mediterranean sensibility. Many of its citizens are Slavs.

The name of the city is just one spare letter away from the Italian word for sad, and there is a moody melancholy that descends on the place in the winter, a quality that attracted the writer James Joyce.

Joyce is an honorary local with a statue that makes him seem positively cheery. He wrote The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Caffe Pirona. It is still there on the Largo Barriera Vecchia, with the delicious chocolate pastries a daunting obstacle to any would-be writer trying to concentrate on creating a new literary classic.

The coffee-houses are Trieste's proudest feature, a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire era, and oozing 19^th century style. One of the finest is the Caffe San Marco on Via Cesare Battisti, with Venetian murals offering a touch of antique class, while the polished chrome of the coffee machines testify that the Italians devote as much of their engineering genius to creating a proper espresso as they do to fine-tuning a Ferrari.

Cathedral San Giusto, Trieste

The tourist sights in Trieste range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The glories lie in the San Giusto cathedral, an underrated example of a provincial basilica, with some graceful mosaics dating from the 11^th century. The lines of the cathedral have an Eastern feel, redolent of Byzantine or Orthodox churches.

By contrast, the fascist war memorial is constructed in the bombastic, neo-classical style associated with Mussolini. The municipal buildings have a similar ugly self-importance, but that can be solved with a quick about-turn, for views over the Adriatic, with liners coasting down towards the Croatian beach resorts.

Those expecting to dine on anti-pasti and delicate Italian pasta dishes may be surprised by Trieste's restaurant scene. Many locals seem to prefer to gnaw on a ham bone and pile up mounds of sauerkraut on their plates, perhaps another legacy of Austrian rule.

Trieste cuisine, the Cucina Triestina, blends Italian, Slavic and German influences. Gnocchi with cheese and ham are close cousins of Eastern Europe's dumpling dishes, and the local specialty, stinco, is a baked veal or pork hock that would be perfectly at home in any German bierkeller.

In fact there is no shortage of bierkellers in Trieste. The Friuli-Venezia wines are perfectly quaffable, but beer is the drink of choice in the city. There's a massive choice at the Forst Birreria on Via Galatti, which attracts a crowd that covers all age-groups.

Castello di Miramare

In summer, Trieste cheers up, and everybody heads up the coast to Miramare. It's one of those romantic 19^th century castles that seems to have been built from a Disney sketch. Its gardens are the highlight, with romantic trails meandering through woods and around the Adriatic coast.

Among the castle's past residents were Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Both met unhappy ends, but then that air of lurking sadness is part of Trieste's character. It's a city of history, mystery and intrigue, caught at the crossroads of contrasting cultures.