Three days in Trieste: Vienna's seaport, left behind at the edge of Italy
Two nights on a coast that has been Italian for about a century, with Habsburg squares, Viennese coffee houses, and a wind that occasionally shuts the streets.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Trieste
- Places
- 6 across 3 days
For two hundred years Trieste was the sea for an empire that had almost none. Vienna made it a free port in 1719 and it grew into the outlet for everything central Europe wanted to ship, which is why a city in Italy has the architecture of a Habsburg capital: enormous neoclassical squares, insurance company palaces, and coffee houses with marble tables and newspapers on sticks.
Then the empire dissolved and Trieste woke up in 1918 as an Italian border town with no hinterland, and it has been slightly out of place ever since. Slovenia is fifteen minutes away, the Balkans start at the top of the hill, and the local dialect and the local food belong to none of its neighbours exactly.
It is a city for people who like reading in cafés more than queueing for museums. There are not many sights and the good ones are excellent: a hill with a Roman forum and a cathedral on it, a Habsburg fantasy castle on a headland, and a square opening straight onto the sea.
Highlights
- A vast neoclassical square with nothing on the fourth side but the Adriatic
- Coffee houses where Joyce wrote and the ordering vocabulary is still local and confusing
- A white castle on a headland built by an archduke who left it to be shot in Mexico
- A cathedral made by knocking two older churches together, on a hill of Roman ruins
Where to stay
Trieste, two nights
A city of about two hundred thousand people on a narrow shelf between the sea and a limestone plateau, at the top of the Adriatic and the corner of three worlds. It was Roman, then a small Venetian rival that handed itself to Austria in 1382 to avoid being swallowed, then an imperial port, then Italian, then occupied, then a disputed free territory until 1954.
That history left a mixed population, a Serbian Orthodox church and one of the largest synagogues in Europe standing a short walk apart, and a habit of not entirely belonging to the country it is in.
Day by day
Day 1 in Trieste
The canal, the great square, and a pier at sunset
The first afternoon is a flat walk. Start at the short canal cut into the eighteenth century grid so that ships could unload in the middle of town, with a neoclassical church closing the view at one end and a small bronze James Joyce leaning on the bridge. He lived here for about a decade, taught English, drank a great deal, and wrote most of Dubliners and a good part of Ulysses within a few streets of this bridge.
Walk south to the great square, which is the size of a parade ground, floored in pale stone with blue lights set into it, and open on the fourth side directly onto the sea. There is nothing else quite like it in Italy, and there is not supposed to be: it was built to impress people arriving by ship.
Then walk out along the pier. It is a couple of hundred metres of stone jutting into the harbour, and at sunset half the city is on it.
- 16:00
Canal Grande
OtherA short canal with cafés along both quays, a church with a portico at the head of it, and the Joyce statue on the bridge. The Serbian Orthodox church a few steps away, blue-domed and mosaicked, is worth going into.
- 18:00
Molo Audace
OtherA stone pier reaching into the harbour off the main square, with a wind rose set into the far end. Free, always open, and the single best half hour in the city on a clear evening.
- 20:00
Dinner at a buffet
EatNot a self-service counter: a Trieste institution where boiled pork, sausage and mustard are carved to order and eaten standing at a marble shelf with a glass of Terrano. One of the oldest has been doing it since before the war.
With more time: The city's grand coffee houses are all within five minutes of the square, and they are not museums: people work in them all day. Order a capo in B, take a newspaper off the rack and stay for an hour, which is the correct use of an evening here.
Day 2 in Trieste
The Roman city, the hill, and a merchant's picture collection
Roman Trieste is right under the modern one. A theatre from the first century sits in a hollow between the old town and the sea, excavated in the 1930s and now surrounded by apartment blocks that look down into it.
Above it, the hill. At the top are the fragments of the forum, a castle with ramparts you can walk, and a cathedral that is two churches: in the fourteenth century the city took a fifth century basilica and a neighbouring church and knocked the wall out between them, which is why the front is lopsided and there are two apses inside, both with Byzantine-style mosaics.
In the afternoon, back down to a nineteenth century merchant's house. Baron Revoltella made a fortune in shipping, part-financed the Suez Canal, and left his home and his collection to the city, so you walk through the rooms as he furnished them and then into a modern gallery built behind.
- 09:30
The Roman Theatre
VisitA Roman theatre for six thousand people, dug out of the slope in the first century and lost under housing until it was uncovered between the wars. You can look straight down into it from the street for nothing.
- 10:45
San Giusto Cathedral and Castle
VisitCathedral and castle together at the top of the hill. The mosaics in the two apses are the reason to go inside; the castle ramparts are the reason to keep climbing, with the whole gulf and the Slovenian hills laid out.
- 13:00
Lunch in the old town
EatThe lanes on the way back down the hill have small places doing jota and goulash for very little. Heavy food, and appropriate in any weather this city produces.
- 14:30
Museo Revoltella
HistoricThe house is the point: three floors of nineteenth century rooms exactly as their owner left them in 1869, with a modern gallery grafted on behind and a roof terrace at the top.
With more time: The Risiera di San Sabba, a rice mill in the southern suburbs, was the only camp in Italy with a crematorium and is now a national memorial. It is free, sobering and about twenty minutes out by bus, and it is the part of the city's twentieth century that the squares do not tell you about.
Day 3 in Trieste
Miramare, and the coast road
The last morning is a bus ride up the coast to a white castle on a rock, built in the 1850s for the Archduke Maximilian, the emperor's younger brother, who laid out the gardens with trees from everywhere he had sailed. He then accepted an offer to become emperor of Mexico, left, and was shot by a firing squad in 1867 without ever coming back. His wife lost her mind. The local superstition that the house is unlucky has been reinforced several times since.
The interiors are intact, small and oddly domestic for a palace, with a bedroom fitted out like a ship's cabin. The park around it runs down to the water and is free, and the sea in front is a protected marine reserve.
The bus is twenty minutes back to the centre, which makes an early afternoon train comfortable.
- 09:15
Miramare Castle
HistoricBus number six from the square near the station, then a short walk. Go at opening and see the rooms first, then the park; the terrace at the tip of the promontory is the photograph everybody takes.
- 12:30
Coffee and a slice of strudel
EatIn the park café or back in town, whichever suits the train. Apple strudel here is Austrian rather than Italian and served warm.
- 13:30
The train out
TravelTrieste Centrale is at the top of the eighteenth century grid, a flat ten minutes from the main square. Venice is about two hours and Ljubljana under three by bus.
With more time: If you would rather go up than along, the plateau behind the city has a giant cave that has held a place in the record books for its single enormous chamber, and a cliff path from Opicina with the whole gulf below it.
Before you go
Where to stay
The Borgo Teresiano, the grid of streets laid out around the canal in the eighteenth century, is central, handsome and full of hotels, and everything below is a fifteen minute walk from it. The old town on the slope up to the castle is smaller, older and quieter.
The station is at the northern edge of that grid, so arriving is easy. Staying out along the coast towards Miramare is lovely in summer and puts you on a bus timetable.
Getting around, and the Bora
The centre is flat and walkable and the hill is not, so use the buses for the castle and for Miramare, both of which are a short ride. There is also an elderly tram up the escarpment to the plateau, which has spent recent years in and out of service.
The wind is a real feature and not a joke. The Bora blows down off the plateau in gusts that can pass a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, most often in winter, and the city has handrails and ropes on some streets because of it. When it is blowing hard, ferries stop and walking along the front becomes a physical effort. There is a small museum devoted entirely to it, which tells you how seriously people here take the subject.
Timing and tickets
Nothing here sells out. Miramare is the only place with any kind of queue and it is short. The city museums close on Mondays and several run on shorter winter hours.
Trieste works in any weather because so much of it is indoors and warm: the point of a coffee house city is that a wet afternoon is not a problem. Do the hill and the headland on the clear day and keep the cafés for the other one.
Eating and drinking
The food is Austrian and Slovene as much as Italian. Jota, a thick soup of sauerkraut, beans and pork. Goulash. Boiled pork, sausage and horseradish served at a buffet, which here means a specific kind of old bar where you stand and eat meat off a carving counter. Strudel and Sachertorte for afternoons.
Coffee has its own vocabulary and ordering an espresso by its national name will get you a puzzled look. Here a plain espresso is a nero, one with a drop of foam is a capo, and a capo in a small glass is a capo in B. The historic coffee houses are the ones to sit in, and nobody will hurry you out of one.
Trieste is a city to sit still in. The list of things to see is short and you will have finished it by the second afternoon, which is when the place actually starts: an hour in a café with a newspaper, an hour on the pier, a walk along the front while the light goes.
It is not Italy exactly, and that is the whole appeal.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Trieste worth a trip on its own?
- For a certain sort of traveller, very much: people who like coffee houses, unfashionable cities, twentieth century history and the feeling of being somewhere in between. If you want famous art and beautiful medieval streets, it is the wrong city, and Verona or Padua is the better use of two nights.
- Can I combine it with Slovenia or Croatia?
- Easily, and it is one of the best reasons to come. Ljubljana is a couple of hours by bus, the Slovenian coast at Piran is under an hour and a half, and the karst wine country starts on the plateau immediately behind the city. Trieste makes far more sense as a hinge between countries than as a dead end.
- How bad is the wind?
- In winter it can be genuinely violent for a day or two at a time, and the city carries on regardless. In summer it is usually a welcome breeze. If you visit between November and March, pack a windproof layer and expect at least one day when walking along the seafront is hard work.
- What is there for one extra day?
- The karst plateau: the giant cave, the wine villages that gave Prosecco its name, and the cliff paths above the gulf. Or Muggia, a small Venetian-looking harbour town across the bay reachable by ferry, which is the only bit of Italy on that side of the water.
- When should I come?
- May, June, September and October. Summer is hot and humid and the city empties towards the coast. Winter is when the wind arrives, which some people come specifically for, and it is also when the coffee houses make the most sense.