The train from Venice takes two hours and spends the last twenty minutes running along the water, close enough that the sea fills the window. You arrive at a station that looks like it belongs in Vienna, because in most of the ways that matter it does.<\/p>\n
Trieste was the port of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Not a port, the port. Everything the empire imported or exported came through here, and the city was built to match that importance rather than its size. The result is a place with the civic architecture of a capital and the population of a large town.<\/p>\n
Day one: the piazza that faces the wrong way<\/strong><\/p>\n Start at the Piazza Unita d’Italia, which is the largest sea-facing square in Europe and the clearest statement the city makes about itself. Three sides are heavy imperial buildings. The fourth side is simply open to the Adriatic.<\/p>\n Most Italian squares turn inward and hold you. This one opens out and pushes you toward the water. It was designed by people whose money came from shipping, and it shows you exactly where they thought the important direction was.<\/p>\n Spend the afternoon in the cafes, which are an institution rather than an amenity. Caffe San Marco has been open since 1914, was wrecked in the First World War for being a nest of irredentists, and reopened. It is half bookshop now. Order and sit for two hours. Nobody will hurry you, and being hurried is not what the room is for.<\/p>\n Day two: up the hill, and the difficult part<\/strong><\/p>\n Take the tram to Opicina if it is running, and a bus if it is not. The climb gives you the whole gulf in one view and puts you on the Karst plateau, where the language on the shop signs changes to Slovenian within a few kilometres of the centre.<\/p>\n Coming down, go to the Risiera di San Sabba. It is a former rice mill on the edge of the city that the SS used as a detention camp, and the only one on Italian soil with a crematorium. It is a museum now, and it is not a comfortable hour.<\/p>\n It belongs in any honest account of this city. Trieste spent the twentieth century being claimed, and the claiming was not abstract. The place was Italian, then Austrian in temperament and Italian in law, then fascist, then occupied, then divided into zones under Anglo-American administration until 1954. People here have a longer memory for borders than most, for good reason.<\/p>\n Day three: lunch in a foreign country, and back for dinner<\/strong><\/p>\n Slovenia is twenty minutes away. There is no drama at the border and often no sign of one. Drive or take the bus up to the villages on the Karst and eat at an osmiza, a farmhouse licensed to sell its own wine and cured meat for part of the year.<\/p>\n They are marked by a branch hung outside the door, and they open when the owner decides there is enough wine to sell. There is no menu in the usual sense. You get prosciutto, cheese, bread, and a jug of terrano, which is dark and sharp and tastes faintly of iron.<\/p>\n Come back down for dinner and eat jota, a soup of sauerkraut, beans and pork that is Slovenian, Austrian and Italian depending on who you ask and which is the single most honest thing on any menu in the city.<\/p>\n Getting it right<\/strong><\/p>\n Come in spring or autumn. In winter the bora blows down off the plateau at speeds that have historically required ropes strung along the streets, and the city posts warnings when it is bad.<\/p>\n Do not treat this as a day trip from Venice. The point of Trieste is not a list of sights, and there is no single thing here you must photograph. The point is that it is a city built by one empire, governed by another, populated by three languages, and it has spent a century being comfortable with that. It takes a few days to notice, and it is worth the few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Italian by passport, Austrian by architecture, Slovenian by lunch. A weekend in the least Italian city in Italy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":36,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.brickstemplates.io\/magazine-website-template\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}