Visiting Trieste was one long discovery for me.
Everyone had told me it would be a wonderful experience and that the city is a little jewel box, but my expectations were low. Instead it not only surprised me, it left a strange feeling behind. It must have been the effect of the sea in winter, the castles and that architecture that does not look Italian.
Because this is the thing you need to know before you go: Trieste was the Habsburg port for five centuries, and it only became Italian in 1920. The result is a city with the light of the Mediterranean and the palaces of Vienna, where coffee is drunk as in Prague and the dialect borrows from Slovene and German.
In this post I’ll tell you what to see in Trieste in 2 days, from Roman ruins to Byzantine mosaics, from Joyce’s cafés to the castle on the sea.
Let’s go!
1 – Piazza Unità d’Italia, the square that opens onto the sea
A post about what to see in Trieste has to start here, and not out of habit: piazza Unità d’Italia is the largest square in Europe facing the sea, and that is what makes it unique. Three sides of solemn palaces and a fourth side that simply is not there: there is the Adriatic instead.
It used to be called piazza Grande, and it sits at the foot of San Giusto hill. Today it is the administrative centre of the city: its buildings house the town hall, the prefecture and the Friuli Venezia Giulia regional government. They were built between the mid-eighteenth and the early twentieth century, and the feeling they give is of an imperial drawing room left open onto the water.
At the centre is the Fountain of the Four Continents, made between 1751 and 1754: it represents Europe, Asia, Africa and America (Oceania was not yet counted), topped by a figure personifying Trieste. Look around the base: nets, bales, sacks and cotton, that is, the goods on which the city built its fortune. The fountain has had a turbulent life, between dismantlings, threats of demolition and acts of vandalism; between 2001 and 2005 the square was reorganised and the fountain moved back to the centre, facing the town hall.
One tip: come back here in the evening. With the lights on the palaces and the darkness over the sea it is one of the most beautiful places in Italy.
2 – Molo Audace and the wind rose cast “in enemy bronze”
From the square you walk straight out onto the Molo Audace, the promenade the people of Trieste love more than anything else: two hundred and forty-six metres out into the sea, and at the end nothing but the horizon.
The pier dates from 1743-1751 and was built over the wreck of the ship San Carlo, which had sunk in the harbour: hence its old name, Molo San Carlo. It took its present name in 1922, in memory of the destroyer Audace, the first ship of the Italian Navy to dock in Trieste on 3 November 1918, at the end of the First World War.
At the end of the pier stands a large bronze wind rose from 1925. It looks like any decorative object, and instead it is a manifesto: it was cast from the bronze of Austro-Hungarian cannon, and along its side it reads “fusa in bronzo nemico”, cast in enemy bronze. In the first version of this post I wrote that it came from a sunken Austrian ship: the source was inaccurate, they were cannon.
Walking along the Rive you will also come across the bronze groups the city has placed along the seafront, such as the seamstresses sitting on the low wall with the sea in front of them. They are recent works, but they capture this city’s relationship with its water.
3 – San Giusto hill: cathedral, castle and Roman forum
Climb San Giusto hill and within a hundred metres you find three thousand years of city: the Roman forum, the medieval cathedral and the Venetian-Austrian castle.
The cathedral of San Giusto is genuinely unique, because it was born from the fusion of two pre-existing churches, one dedicated to the Assumption and one to the martyr Justus, patron saint of the city. The unification under a single roof happened between 1302 and 1320 at the wish of bishop Rodolfo Pedrazzani da Robecco: in the process one aisle was pulled down, which is why the building you see today has five naves with a slightly crooked air about them, each keeping part of its original decoration.
The façade will surprise you with how heterogeneous it is: a great Gothic rose window in karst stone, medieval sculpture and reused Roman material taken from the forum next door. The bell tower even incorporates the propylaeum of a Roman temple.
Then look at the masonry of the bell tower and find the cannonballs still lodged in it: they are from the Austro-British bombardment of 1813 against the Napoleonic troops holed up in the castle. And there is a sequel, because the great bell, the Campanon, was cast in 1829 from the bronze of Napoleonic cannon. The same war, first in the wall and then in the sound of the bells.
But the treasure is inside, in the side apses: the Byzantine mosaics. On one side the Virgin Theotokos between the archangels, by Venetian and Constantinopolitan craftsmen of the 12th century; on the other Christ Pantocrator between saints Justus and Servulus, by Byzantine craftsmen of the 13th century. The mosaic in the central apse, on the other hand, is modern, do not be fooled. And on the floor Roman mosaics of the 5th century survive.
Next to the cathedral are the remains of the forensic basilica and of the forum, with the columns re-erected, and the castle of San Giusto, built by the Venetians and then extended by the Austrians between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries: you can walk the ramparts, and the view over the gulf is the one you came for.
4 – Miramare Castle
If you ask anyone what to see in Trieste, they will answer “Miramare”. And they are right.
Miramare Castle stands sheer above the sea, white as the foam of the waves, set in a twenty-two hectare park with plants brought from half the world. It was commissioned by Ferdinand Maximilian of Habsburg, younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph (Sissi’s husband), and his wife Charlotte of Belgium furnished it with a taste that can still be seen: the original furniture and decoration are still inside.
Maximilian’s story is told by the rooms themselves, and it is a story that ends badly. The interiors speak of his passion for botany and sailing, of his brother’s visit, and then of his departure to be crowned Emperor of Mexico: he never came back from that journey, he was shot at Querétaro in 1867.
What struck me most of all is his study, fitted out like the inside of a ship: a man who built himself a bridge inside a stone house facing the sea. And the room with the portraits of the most powerful men of the time, which is a snapshot of an era.
On the second floor you visit the apartment of another figure: Duke Amedeo of Savoy-Aosta, known as the “iron duke”, who stayed here from 1930 to 1937 and had the whole floor modernised in 1930s style. The jump between the two floors is one of the most effective ways I know of understanding how taste changes in seventy years.
Practical information, because this is where things change. Miramare is the only attraction in Trieste with a real ticket and timed, capacity-controlled entry: at weekends and in high season there is a queue at the desk, and it is avoidable. If you want to be relaxed about it, here you can find the skip-the-line ticket for the castle. The park, on the other hand, is visited separately and costs very little: if you are short of time and have to choose, the park at sunset is an experience worth as much as the castle.
In the castle’s stables there is a space for temporary exhibitions: I stumbled onto an art nouveau show and came out delighted. Check the programme before you go, because it changes.
5 – The Canal Grande and Joyce’s cafés
Head back into the centre and look for the Canal Grande, which is at once the most Venetian and the least Italian thing in Trieste: a canal dug in the mid-eighteenth century between the port and the square, so that boats could unload their cargo inside the city. Today there are moored boats and neoclassical palaces reflected in the still water, with the church of Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo closing the perspective at the end and the blue dome of the Serbian Orthodox church of San Spiridione just beyond.
And now sit down, because it is time for coffee, and in Trieste coffee is a serious matter.
This has been Italy’s main coffee port for two centuries: green coffee arrives here, it is roasted here, and Illy was born here. The consequence is that the locals have a vocabulary of their own, and if you order “un caffè” they will look at you patiently. Learn the three words that matter: “nero” is an espresso, “capo” is a macchiato in a cup, “capo in b” is a macchiato in a little glass. That is what everyone orders.
The historic places to sit are the Caffè San Marco, the Tommaseo (the oldest, 1830) and the Caffè degli Specchi on piazza Unità. And here we come to the part I barely touched on in the first version of this post, and which is in fact the reason Trieste matters in the history of European culture.
In these cafés, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba (whose antiquarian bookshop was here, and still is) and James Joyce met. Joyce arrived in Trieste in 1904 with Nora Barnacle and lived here for nearly sixteen years. Here he taught English to make a living (one of his pupils was Svevo, who thanks to him was finally recognised as a writer), here he wrote or published Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, and here he began Ulysses. Part of that book was born in this city, not in Dublin.
There is a statue of him on the Ponterosso, and the city has a Joyce museum. If you love literature, Trieste is a kind of pilgrimage.
Oh, and half an hour from here is Duino Castle: Rainer Maria Rilke was a guest there in 1912 and began the Duino Elegies. The cliff path leading to the castle is called, of course, the Rilke path.
6 – Tergeste: ancient Rome in Trieste
Did you know Trieste was inhabited before the Romans?
They were the Carni and the Histri, and the city’s name comes from them. But it was the Romans who made it a real city, Tergeste, and the traces are still in the urban fabric.
The most impressive is the Roman theatre, two minutes from piazza Unità: you walk past and there it is, opened up in the middle of the buildings. It was built between the end of the 1st and the beginning of the 2nd century AD, and two clarifications belong here, because in the first version of this post I simplified: it was not “commissioned by the emperor Trajan”, but built in Trajan’s time on the initiative of a local notable, Quintus Petronius Modestus, procurator of the emperor, whose name appears in the inscriptions (other readings suggest he only oversaw an enlargement). It could hold between 3,500 and 6,000 spectators, and it used the natural slope of the hill both for the tiers and for the acoustics. At the time the sea came almost up to its doors.
The theatre lay buried under houses for centuries: it was brought back to light only by the excavations between July 1937 and September 1938. Today you can see it from outside for free, every day.
Climbing towards the castle you find instead the Arco di Riccardo, 7.2 metres high, wedged between the houses as if it had grown inside them. It is from the mid-1st century AD and it is what remains of a gate in the city’s Roman walls.
As for the name, legend has it that it comes from Richard the Lionheart, who on his way back from the Holy Land is said to have been held prisoner in Trieste too. It is a good story and the locals tell it happily, but the better documented explanation is more prosaic: “Riccardo” is a corruption of “del Cardo”, the cardo maximus, the north-south street of Roman cities, which ran right here.
7 – The Victory Lighthouse
On the hill of Gretta, above the city, stands the Faro della Vittoria, the Victory Lighthouse, and it is two things at once: a working lighthouse that lights the gulf, and a monument.
Built between 1923 and 1927 to a design by the architect Arduino Berlam, it is 68 metres tall, which puts it among the highest lighthouses in the world. It stands on the foundations of the old Austrian fort Kressich (1854-1857), sixty metres above sea level: a choice that is itself a message, as everything about this monument is.
Here I have to correct a mistake in the first version of this post, and it is not a detail: the lighthouse is dedicated to the sailors who died at sea in the First World War, not the Second. It was built in the 1920s, that is, right after that conflict and the annexation of Trieste to Italy.
The inscription on the base is by Gabriele D’Annunzio:
“Shine and remember the fallen at sea”
At the top is the winged Victory, and the structure has a mechanism that lets it absorb the gusts of the bora by imperceptibly “beating” its wings. At its foot, the relics: the anchor of the destroyer Audace, the ship of 3 November 1918, and at the entrance two shells from the Austro-Hungarian battleship Viribus Unitis, sunk at Pola in 1918. (In the first version I attributed the anchor to the battleship: it belongs to the Audace.)
8 – The Risiera di San Sabba
This chapter was not here, and I do not think an honest guide to Trieste can be without it.
In a suburb of the city stands a former rice-husking plant, built at the end of the nineteenth century. During the Nazi occupation, between 1943 and 1945, the Germans turned it into a camp for detention and elimination: the Risiera di San Sabba was the only concentration camp equipped with a crematorium on Italian soil.
It has been a national monument since 15 April 1965, by decree of President Giuseppe Saragat, and between 1972 and 1975 the architect Romano Boico turned it into a civic museum with an essential, powerful intervention: he emptied it rather than rebuilding it.
Entry is free. It is not a tourist stop and you do not go there to “see something”: you go because it is here, and it is part of the history of this border city just as much as the Habsburg palaces of piazza Unità.
What and where to eat in Trieste
In Trieste you eat as though you were in another part of Europe, and that is half the fun.
The cooking is Central European and Adriatic at the same time. Things to try:
- prosciutto in a bread crust with kren (horseradish), eaten in the buffet, the great Triestine institution: places where you stand at the counter and order boiled pork and cold cuts;
- jota, a soup of sauerkraut, beans and potatoes;
- patate in tecia, potatoes crushed and browned with onion, and chifeletti;
- ćevapčići and the other Balkan arrivals, which are entirely at home here;
- for dessert, putizza and presnitz, rolls filled with dried fruit and nuts of obvious Austrian descent, and the Sachertorte of the historic cafés.
And if you are around in season, look for an osmiza: these are the houses of Karst farmers who, for a few days a year, are allowed to sell their own wine and produce directly. You eat at long wooden tables, you pay very little, and it is not a tourist experience: it is a Habsburg-era law still in force.
In the first version of this post I recommended four restaurants by name. I have cut them, and here is why: they were 2018 addresses, and in the meantime signs, management and menus change. A food tip eight years old is not a tip, it is a risk. Better the general rule: walk two streets away from piazza Unità, go in where the locals are, and ask what is tipico.
Practical information for visiting Trieste
Getting there. Trieste has an airport (Ronchi dei Legionari, half an hour away, connected by train) and the central station is a ten-minute walk from piazza Unità. From Venice it is about two hours by train.
Getting around. The centre is walkable. For Miramare there is bus 6, and in summer also the boat from the Molo Audace, which is the most beautiful way to arrive. For San Giusto hill there is bus 24, if you would rather not walk up.
How long you need. Two days is the right measure: the first for the centre, San Giusto hill and the cafés, the second for Miramare and, if you have a car, Duino or the Karst. With three days you can add the Risiera, the Grotta Gigante and a hop into Slovenia.
What it costs. Not much. Piazza Unità, the Molo Audace, the Roman theatre seen from outside, the Arco di Riccardo, the cathedral and the Risiera are free. You pay for Miramare (castle and park separately), for San Giusto castle and for the civic museums.
The bora. You need to know this: Trieste has a wind like nowhere else. On days of strong bora it passes a hundred kilometres an hour, and in some spots in the centre there are still ropes to hold on to. If you land on one of those days it is not a disaster, it is an experience, but wear shoes that grip.
When to go. Spring and autumn. I went in February and I still remember the winter sea in that light, but it was cold. If you are into sailing, the second Sunday of October brings the Barcolana, one of the most crowded regattas in the world: the city fills up and the gulf is covered with two thousand sails.
What struck me most about Trieste, beyond the stones, are the people: I have never found a city in Italy where people go so far out of their way to help you. When I asked a lady for directions, she walked me all the way to the church I was looking for. They say they are proud of it, and the explanation they will give you is that a port and border city has, over centuries, learned to welcome.
If you have an extra day, cross the border and go to Ljubljana: the Slovenian capital is an hour and a half away and it amazed me. And if the literary cafés have given you a taste for bohemia, I’ll see you in Montmartre.
And you, would you come to Trieste for the sea, for Miramare or for the coffee?
