Trieste

The literary cafes and the Karst Plateau, on clear days, seem to leap into the sea in the embrace of an extraordinary quintet of neo-classical palaces.

Trieste is a city that is hard to pinpoint because of its broad fascination as a middle-European crossroads that influenced great writers like Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba and James Joyce.

Trieste means music, and not only because it is the home of the Teatro Verdi, which, erected in 1801 near the sea, inspired composer Giuseppe Verdi and still inspires its audiences today. Trieste is a literary salon: historic meeting places like Caffè degli Specchi, Caffè Tommaseo and Caffè San Marco are like Viennese cafes where one samples the local pastry.

Trieste is a jewel case containing rare treasures like the Cenotafioby Winckelmann in the Museo Civico di Storia ed Arte, the drawings by Tiepolo in the Museo Sartorio, the theatrical heritage (second only to that of La Scala in Milan) in the Museo Morpurgo, the gallery of modern art in the Museo Revoltella and the dinosaur Antonio, the only fossil of an entire androsaur, in the Civic Museum of Natural History.

Trieste is a multicultural city: the Cattedrale di San Giusto from the fourteenth century on the hill of the same name, the Greek-Orthodox Church of San Nicolò with its precious gold icons, the Serbo-Orthodox Church of San Spiridione of Byzantine splendour, and the Israelite Temple, one of the largest synagogues in Europe, are all examples of religious coexistence.

Trieste is also a cradle of the sciences: The International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the Light Synchrotron Laboratory, the Laboratory of Scientific Imaging, and Italy’s principal scientific park, the AREA Science Park, are just some of its internationally famous institutions. Trieste is, above all else, the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia that faces the sea, surrounded by literary cafes, and is one of the most beautiful squares in Europe.

Do not miss:

• A visit to the Miramare Castle and its splendid park with a thousand botanical specimens The Rilke Path that overhangs the sea, while buried in a forest between Duino and Sistiana;
• The Giant Cave, one of the largest caverns in the world that can be explored completely;
• The Barcolana, the great sailing festival held on the second Sunday of October.