The city of Trieste is not high on the list of must-see Italian cities, but for those who love culture, literature, history, the intermingling of histories and, perhaps above all, good coffee should put it very near to the top of their travel agendas. Other travelers have done so and been richly rewarded.

“I cannot always see Trieste in my mind’s eye. Who can? It is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination. It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single name that everyone knows. It is a middle-sized, essentially middle-aged Italian seaport, ethnically ambivalent, historically confused, only intermittently prosperous, tucked away at the top right-hand corner of Italy that in 1999 some 70 percent of Italians, so a poll claimed to discover, did not know it was in Italy at all. There are moments in my life, nevertheless, when a suggestion of Trieste is summoned so exactly into my consciousness that wherever I am, I feel myself transported there. The sensation is rather like those arcane moments of hush that sometimes interrupts a perfectly ordinary conversation and are said to signify the passing of an angel.”

So begins Welsh writer Jan Morris’ beautiful travel book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, published in 2001. Morris has been traveling to this far-flung corner of Italy for more than five decades. She reveled in its faded grandeur, steep hillsides, playful light and the ghosts and shadows of writers James Joyce and Italo Svevo and haughty and whiskered Austro-Hungarian generals and officers. Some of these officers had grand names such as Rear Admiral Baron Alfred von Koudelka, or less noble ones such as Francesco Illy, who stayed in the city after the end of World War I—which saw the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire—and founded the now world-famous brand of coffee that still bears his last name.

We can use the term “faded grandeur” with confidence here, for Trieste in the late 19th and early 20th centuries could rightly claim to be one of the most important ports in the world, the “mouth” for a vast empire that stretched across half of Europe and included the now-Polish province of Galicia, the now-Romanian province of Transylvania, the now-Croatian province of Dalmatia, the now-Italian provinces of Trentino and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which contains Trieste, and all of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Its citizens numbered in the tens of millions.

One of them, the Hungarian George Lang, who survived the Holocaust and founded the once venerable New York City restaurant Café des Artistes, once told me, “I lived in six different countries but never moved house,” a reference to the continually shifting borders of the region and a seemingly never-ending roster of invading armies.

Since reading Morris’ book, I have always wanted to visit. Occasionally, the city’s name would pop up in my thoughts. My girlfriend Francesca’s dear friend Paola lived in the city for a couple of years as a researcher and another dear friend, of hers and her parents, Ivana, an Slovene-Italian, was born nearby and lived there for many years. She now lives in Venice with her husband Francesco, and when we recently visited them and that beautiful city, I had my chance—although the November weather nearly thwarted me.

The train from Venice (and I hope to add something on Venice, La Serenissima, on the Website soon) takes two hours. The Dolomite Mountains, visible to the left for long stretches, disappear as the rails arc around the Gulf of Trieste and head to the Istrian Peninsula.

The city’s detachment is immediately evident. It is at the end of the rail line, at the end of Italy in the hardest spot to reach in the whole of the Adriatic Sea that extends from Italy’s heel all the way up past the Venetian Lagoon and along the coastal lengths of Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia. A thick slab of karst limestone plummets down from Slovenia and wedges little Trieste hard against its water line, a mile of sea wall that on a breezy date catches just a whiff of the distant but connected Mediterranean. The light here has a diaphanous quality, as though nothing in the city could escape your attention. It reflected sparkling off the sandstone buildings and port and canal waters. Looking back up the limestone rock, a visitor pictures the 5,000 caves that geologists claim stud its faces and conjures the legends of the fierce mountain dwellers who supposedly lived there and emerged on occasion to wreak havoc in this tidy port of business. A funicular-tram that leaves Trieste for the village of Opicina reaches one of these caves, the Grotta Grande, one of the largest caves in the world that can be visited by tourists.

Trieste was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s only port and thus had an importance vastly larger than its size. Important businesses—the Googles and General Motors of its day—were founded there and included Austrian Lloyd Trieste, an insurance group that modeled itself—and liberally used part of its name, too—on Lloyd’s of London. It added to insurance the running of steamships both for manufactured goods and pleasure seekers, and in the 19th century it ran routes to Port Saïd and Alexandria (Egypt), Calcutta and Mumbai (India), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Singapore and Hong Kong—All from this tiny speck of Italy.

But not always Italy. After World War II, it became for a decade the Free Territory of Trieste, the Axis Powers deciding upon this course in order to hold back the increasing powers of the Soviet Bloc. More than 10,000 Allied troops kept the peace, and the territory never really ever ran on an independent basis. After a decade, the territory was split into two sections, Trieste and environs, run by administrators hailing from the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and a southern section that was headed by what were then regarded as Yugoslavians. That was the way things remained until 1975, when the two areas were formerly divided and handed to Italy and Yugoslavia, respectively (the latter part was divided between Slovenia and Croatia when Yugoslavia broke up in the late 1980s and early 1990s). In early public campaigns to foster the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-backed scheme to revitalize Europe after World War II, the flag of the Free Territory of Trieste—a fleur-de-lys on a red background—fluttered proudly with the other European flags, all of which we would still recognize today (it’s also interesting to see that the Turkish flag is among them, which might not be nice viewing to those who are still trying to counter Turkey’s entry into the European Union).

When I walked slowly through this small city I was not sure whether it looked toward the sea or toward Slovenia. Perhaps it now looks only inwards toward well-ordered lives and houses, its hodgepodge of traditions and influences and its continuing success in business.

It is the sea that you first see after leaving the rail station. The road curves around until it arrives at the harbor and its principal pier, the Molo dei Bersaglieri. To your left, is the city’s only canal (and having been in Venice for a week, I had been thoroughly spoiled by seeing handfuls of canals at every turn). It takes the name the Grand Canal, an odd moniker for any canal when there only is one, although its delusion of grandeur is saved by the ornate, impressive architecture standing to both sides. To the canal’s northern side is the Via Giocchino Rossini, named for the composer who wrote The Barber of Seville, among other operas, and on its southern side is the Via Vincenzo Bellini, named for a fellow composer.

Artistic types might have gone to Venice for inspiration, but they came to Trieste to write, and in order to afford to write, to work, too. Ireland’s most famous writer James Joyce lived in Trieste between 1904 and 1920 (tumultuous years in Europe), and it was here that he wrote much of his classic, Ulysses, his memories of Dublin formed in the cafés and streets of Trieste, and all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce also worked for language school Berlitz, where one of his Trieste pupils was the Italian/Austro-Hungarian writer Italo Sveno, whose Confessions of Zeno remains in publication. Unlike Joyce, Sveno was a successful businessman, and there is a statue of him on the Piazzo Attilio Hortis, which is named after a politician and literary historian. Svevo, some think, despite a dearth of doctoral dissertations disagreeing with this viewpoint, was the influence for the character Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

The weather when I was there was very calm for November, even tending to the warm, a long cry from the chill associated with the infamous bora winds that on one morning in 1956 tore through the city at a speed of almost 140 miles per hour, which is well beyond hurricane-strength levels.

The bora would regularly sweep people off their feet. I searched for the handholds that Austro-Hungarian officials were said to have etched into or attached to walls and railings all over the city and especially by the port.

Some visitors were swept off and never returned. Bruce Chatwin in his travel book, Songlines, in which he writes on Australia’s Aborigines, meets an Australian called Arkady Volchok. Volchok, an expert on Aboriginal affairs, explained that his family originally came from Central Europe, among the millions to have been affected by World War II. Chatwin writes:

“[Arkady Volchok’s family] were moved on to Germany, where they were billeted in what had been an officers’ club…They applied for emigration papers, to the United States and Canada: Argentina, they were told, was a better bet for people of doubtful status. At last, after a year of anxious waiting, there came news of jobs in Australia, and passages for the ones who signed.

They took the chance, gladly. All they wanted was to get away from a murderous Europe—from the cold, mud, hunger and lost families—and come to a sunny country where everyone ate.

They sailed from Trieste on a converted hospital ship. Every married couple was segregated on the voyage and could only meet in daylight on deck. After landing at Adelaide, they were interned in a camp of Nissen huts, where men in khaki barked orders in English. Sometimes, they thought they were back in Europe.

On a recent trip to the Dominican Republic, I hopped on a rickety local gua-gua bus and ended up at the only remaining fishing village in the country, Boca del Yuma. I found a small hotel called La Vieja Pirata, which will not win any awards but was pleasant enough. The owner was Italian.

“From which part of Italy are you from?”

“Trieste,” he replied. “Perhaps you never have heard of it.”

Boca de Yuma had a very small harbor, and it might have reminded him of home. Hurricane Georges, which almost wiped Boca de Yuma off the map, would certainly have reminded him of Trieste’s bora winds.

I could not find these bora-resistant handholds. They might have been blown away, like so much from Trieste.

What I did find surprised me. Wandering into the center of the city from its main square, the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia, I came across a Roman theater, very well preserved and semi-circular, at the base of the hill that rises to a hill call San Giusto. It was discovered in 1938 during routine road improvements. At San Giusto is Trieste’s cathedral and castle, the first dating to the 6th century, the latter to the 15th. The cathedral’s huge, round Gothic window is ornate and very noticeable. Inside, I discovered another family that had been blown here by the political winds of Europe, for it is the burial church of one ancestral line of the House of Bourbon, who for more than two centuries claimed the Spanish throne against another line of the same family and led Spain into three Carlist civil wars. One of those buried there, who led the last campaign to capture Spain for his side of the family, had the wonderfully tongue-twisting name of Carlos María de los Dolores Juan Isidro José Francisco Quirin Antonio Miguel Gabriel Rafael de Borbón y Austria-Este, Duke of Madrid. All the men of this branch were called Carlos, hence the wars being dubbed Carlist.

History spinning in my head, I started climbing up towards Slovenia. It is possible to walk there, it being no more than six miles from the port of Trieste to the Slovenian town of Lipica. It is hilly, though, and I got the succinct sense that those who lived at the bottom of the hill and at the top must by default belong to a different people.

I ascended the very steep Via dei Porta, and increasingly I saw signs written in Slovenian. I was in a well-to-do neighborhood, and I heard sentry dogs barking behind high fences. At the top, the buildings appear older, as though floating outside of time with respect to the ones of newer money built below. All felt as though it belonged to a lost neighborhood in an only slightly more remembered city.

Streets in this area were named after people. There were a small handful honoring resistance heroes, Roman senators and unifiers of Italy such as Cessare Battisti, Fabio Severo, Francesco Crispi and Giacomo Matteotti. Others were named for the admired in more gentle disciplines: Goffredo Mameli (poetry), Ugo Foscolo (writing), Giovanni Pascoli (poetry), Michelangelo Buonarroti (art), Ippolito Pindemonte (poetry), Giovanni Verga (writing), Cesare Cantù (poetry and scholarship), Carlo Cattaneo (philosophy), Ludovico Antonio Muratori (scholarship) and Vittorino da Feltre (scholarship), among others. One was named after Carlo de Marchesetti, a botanist. How wonderful is that? There cannot be many streets named after botanists, surely? None, however, were named after women, and all were east of Via Gabriele D’Annuzio, who was himself a very colorful character, being a war hero, a writer, a journalist, an author of novels, poems and constitutions and, some say, the mentor of Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini.

I know D’Annuzio mostly from tales of his 1919 capture of the port city of Fiume, just along the Adriatic Sea from Trieste. In 1919 (at the end of World War I and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), he named the city the Italian Regency of Carnaro, while between 1920 and 1924 he renamed it the Free State of Fiume. Fiume unfolded its own flag and issued postage stamps. In 1924, it became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Today, it is in Croatia and called Rijeka.

Tired, I emerged at a wooded park called Chiadino Boschetto, where numerous dogs were being walked.

The walk down the hillside led me to a pedestrian shopping street and eventually to the only part of Trieste that has department stores and Main Street-style shops. It is also here that Illy has one of its chain of coffee shops, perhaps its flagship shop, and the coffee prepared is delicious. Espresso cups, makers and saucers were for sale.

Performing outside was a marching band of drums and brass, the musicians dressed up in Bavarian hats and Loden coats from the Tirol. Here was another influence on Trieste, from Germany, or perhaps, a remaining shade from its memories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On one drum were painted an Imperial eagle and the words Veci Fanfara Julia. In the Venetian dialect, Veci means “The Old Ones,” as in men of a certain age, but also is used as an affectionate term for Italians who fought in Alpine military units. Fanfara is Italian for “fanfare,” so the band’s name might be translated as the Julia Old Ones Fanfare Band...perhaps.

Just down the road from where the band played was another attraction that pointed yet one more cultural influence, The Trinità e San Spiridione Taumaturgo (The Temple of Very Holy Trinity and Saint Spyridion Thaumaturge). This Serbian church was built in 1868 and contains several religious icons.

By turning right at the end of the Grand Canal, I was back at the train station, a long line of Italian, Slovenian, Croatia, German, Austrian, Hungarian and Serbian influences in my wake. So many are the influences, although ultimately, I realized that all of them make up a city that is far, far more than the sum of its parts.

TRIESTE TRAVEL TIPS

TRANSPORTATION
Air: Trieste’s airport is the Aeroporto Friuli Venezia Giulia (in the town of Ronchi dei Legionari). There are no direct flights from the United States, passengers needing to change in either Paris (Charles de Gaulle) or Munich (Franz Josef Strauss).

Ground Transportation: Trieste is approximately 25 miles from the airport. A taxi to the center of Trieste is approximately $75.

Train: The train from Venice’s Venezia Santa Lucia station (right beside Venice’s Grand Canal) takes between 2.05 or 3 hours depending on type of service. Trieste’s train station is right in the center of the city. The nearest station to Trieste’s airport is Monfalcone, which is about three miles away. It can be reached by Bus #51 or taxi, and the journey between the two stations takes 24 minutes.

CURRENCY
Italy uses the Euro (€). At current exchange rates $1 = €0.80.