A Weekend in Trieste: The Northernmost of Mediterranean Cities

I'm drinking my ritual morning coffee at a small table outside an elegant 19th-century café overlooking the Gulf of Trieste. The sea is ruffled by a sharp little wind that, fortunately, is not the Bora. I'm overtaken by a strange beautiful nostalgia, mixed with a feeling of freedom and curiosity. This is the elusive charm of Trieste, and it's the feeling that will accompany every visit.

I understand quickly that I shouldn't try too hard to grasp it. That is not how you tune in to Trieste. No rationality required, only the awareness of being somewhere that feels undefined on the map, untethered from time. I am in Italy, and yet I am not. A place that reminds me at once of Mediterranean, Venice, the Balkans, Vienna. Distant, often misunderstood. Foreign and deeply Italian at once.

That Trieste remains one of Italy's least known cities is both an injustice and a gift. It has never been overrun by mass tourism. It has kept something intact.

What exactly? Trieste doesn't have one soul. It has a thousand, all living independently and perfectly blended together. It is an unbalanced, fascinating melting pot. A gateway to the Orient and the western edge of the West. Popular and aristocratic, literary and scientific, classical and modern. A city of the sea and the mountains at once. Where the Bora wind makes you "a little crazy". Where Balkan accents mix with Italian words in dialect, with the names of German dishes, with elegant Austro-Hungarian architecture. While a ship slips away, heading East.

None of this is an accident. For two centuries Trieste was a Habsburg free port, the empire's window onto the Mediterranean, and people poured in from across central Europe and the Levant: Greeks, Serbs, Armenians, Jews, Levantine merchants, all settling within a few streets of each other. Then the 20th century arrived badly, two wars and the Iron Curtain falling on the city's eastern edge. Through it all the layers never quite blended. They simply learned to coexist, and that is what you still feel walking through Trieste today.

A walking weekend

Trieste isn’t big, and walking is my favorite way to discover it. The historic core is essentially pedestrian, the city stretches in a long arc along the gulf with the sea on one side and the karst plateau rising sharply on the other. Once you've understood that the centre runs roughly north to south parallel to the water, you are already half-oriented. Just wander around on foot, with the occasional tram or bus, and you will fall in love.

My five stops: Borgo Teresiano (Canal Grande) → Piazza Unità d'Italia → Città Vecchia and colle San Giusto → rione San Giacomo → Borgo Giuseppino. A full day, with stops for coffee. Which, in Trieste, you will do.

Start in the Borgo Teresiano. This is the elegant 18th-century grid laid out by Maria Teresa d'Austria over what used to be salt pans. At its heart runs the Canal Grande, one of the most photographed corners of the city, where palaces lean over the water and small boats still rock at their moorings. From the Ponte Rosso you get the postcard view of the Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Taumaturgo, the neoclassical basilica at the head of the canal. The surrounding streets are full of old shops and artisans' workshops. Don't miss the Drogheria Toso, an apothecary-style grocer that has been here since 1906 and feels like a small museum to itself, with spices and herbal teas sold by the gram, Marseille soaps and brooms made of horsehair. A few blocks away, the Antico Caffè San Marco, opened in 1914, is one of the great literary cafés of Europe: Liberty interiors, brass chandeliers, marble tables, and, since recent owners added a bookshop inside, a quiet confirmation that here coffee and literature really do walk arm in arm.

Then drift south to Piazza Unità d'Italia. The largest sea-facing square in Europe, the salotto di Trieste, is a vast open rectangle bordered on three sides by 19th-century palaces (like Palazzo del Municipio with its bronze bell-strikers Michez and Jachez, and the old Palazzo del Lloyd Triestino) and on the fourth simply opening onto the gulf. Every architectural detail belongs to an imperial court. Sit at the Caffè degli Specchi, founded in 1839 and once the haunt of irredentists, British naval officers and writers like Joyce and Svevo. From the square you step straight onto the rive, the waterfront promenade. Walk out along the Molo Audace, a two-hundred-metre stone pier that seems to reach the horizon. It is one of the most powerful images of the city, especially at sunset.

Climb into the Città Vecchia. Just behind Piazza Unità, the old town is a maze of narrow lanes, hidden courtyards and leaning buildings, with the old ghetto ebraico on one edge. The heart of the ghetto runs along Via Beccherie, lined with antique shops and small bars that light up the street at night. Look for the Giardino di Via San Michele, a tiny pocket of green and one of those discoveries that makes you feel you have earned the walk. From here you keep climbing toward the colle San Giusto, where the city was born. At the top sits the Cattedrale di San Giusto, a strange and beautiful 14th-century building made by stitching two earlier basilicas together, alongside the medieval castle and what is left of the Roman forum. The view alone is worth the climb.

Drop into San Giacomo. Going south down the back of San Giusto you enter the rione San Giacomo, historically the working-class quarter of Trieste and today its quietest multicultural one. Small shops, old osterie, family bakeries, Slovenian and Serbian voices in the post office queue. The old Vecchio Lavatoio, the public washhouse, hosts a small permanent exhibition on the women who used to do all of Trieste's laundry there. Saturday morning is market day and worth timing the walk for.

End in Borgo Giuseppino. South of Piazza Unità, on the other side from the Borgo Teresiano, lies the quieter Borgo Giuseppino. The wonderful early-1900s Old Pescheria, the city's old fish market, has been converted into an exhibition hall called the Salone degli Incanti, with its tall sea-facing facade. The neighbourhood is also home to one of the best vintage shops in town, Katastrofa: part atelier, part curiosity cabinet, where old furniture is hand-painted with floral, baroque or rock motifs that shouldn't work together and somehow do.

Coffee, buffets, and the local way of eating

Trieste's food scene runs on three traditions that you will find nowhere else in Italy in quite the same way.

The first is the literary café. Coffee here is closer to a religion than a habit. The Habsburg merchant city built its salons around it, and the great writers of the early 20th century lived in them. Stop for a capo in b (an espresso macchiato served in a small glass, the local order) at the Caffè degli Specchi on Piazza Unità, or settle in for an afternoon at the Antico Caffè San Marco with a book and a slice of Sacher. Walk a few streets to the Pasticceria Caffetteria Pirona, an institution since the early 1900s and the favourite of James Joyce, who lived around the corner. It is tiny and you mostly stand, but the presnitz, putizza and Austro-Hungarian pastries are some of the best in the city, and the brass and cherry-wood interiors haven't changed in over a century.

The second is the buffet. Born for the dockworkers who needed hot food at any hour, the buffet has been a Trieste institution for more than a hundred years. The kitchen is built around a great steaming cauldron of boiled pork: porcina (boiled neck of pork), cotechino, carré, cragno sausage, ham still in its bread crust, all served with mustard and freshly grated kren (horseradish). Buffet da Pepi, open since 1897, is the most famous and, on a good day, lives up entirely to its reputation. Before heading home, stop at the Salumeria Antica Bottega del Gusto, a small specialty store packed with mountain hams, paprika, jars of horseradish and mustard. It is the kind of place you walk into for a snack and walk out of with a suitcase upgrade.

The third is the osmiza, and it is unique to this corner of Italy. Osmize are not in the city itself: they live on the Carso, the karst plateau above Trieste, where small farms open their doors to sell their own wine and cured meats directly from the cellar. A handful of leafy branches hung at a crossroads signals that an osmiza is open. Inside you get a wooden board of prosciutto del Carso, hard cheese, hard-boiled eggs, pickles, homemade bread, and a glass of Vitovska or Terrano, the two emblematic local wines. There are no menus, no waiters, often no signs, and the rotation changes every couple of weeks. Which is why the best way to find a good one is to ask: your B&B host, a local guidebook, a triestino at the next table, or drop us a line and we will point you to the ones we love. Everyone will have strong, contradictory opinions, and the discovery is half the fun. It is the most local thing you can do around Trieste, and one of the most beautiful.

If you have an extra day

A weekend covers the city. A third day opens up the rest, and the rest is unusually good.

How to pick: a few hours? Castello di Miramare and a walk back along Barcola. Half a day? Add the Carso, where the osmize live. A full day? Take the ferry across the bay to Muggia, the small Venetian-style town that closes the gulf to the south.

Take the bus or the regional train from Trieste center out to the Castello di Miramare, the white fairytale castle built for Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg on a promontory facing the sea. The park around it is free, the gardens are lovely in any season, and the castle interiors are kept almost exactly as he left them. Walk back along Barcola, the long seaside promenade where the triestini come to swim, sunbathe and complain about the weather. The numbered concrete bathing terraces, the famous Topolini, are a local institution: in summer the whole strip feels like a relaxed urban beach with the city skyline at one end and the white walls of Miramare at the other.

On the hill above stands the Faro della Vittoria, at once a working lighthouse and a memorial to the Trieste sailors lost in the First World War. Below it spreads the Porto Vecchio, the abandoned 19th-century industrial port, slowly being reopened to the city hangar by hangar. It is one of the more interesting urban regeneration projects in Italy right now, and you can already wander much of it on foot.

For something more local, try one of Trieste's two historic bagni cittadini, the old sea baths the city still uses with surprising loyalty. The Ausonia is the genteel one, all elegant 1930s atmosphere, the bath of choice for the well-heeled triestini. The Pedocin, just along the coast, is a small piece of European oddity worth seeing with your own eyes: the last gender-segregated city beach in Europe, where women bathe on one side of a concrete wall and men on the other.

And then there is the Carso, the karst plateau above the city. Cool, stony, scented with pine and juniper, almost rural the moment you leave the last houses behind. This is where the osmize live, and where you really start to understand that Trieste is not just a coastal city but a frontier. Twenty minutes further on, the small Venetian-style town of Muggia sits across the bay, with its colourful houses and quiet harbour. Take the ferry from the rive and arrive by sea, the way the city has always done.

When to go

Trieste is a year-round city, but each season is a different city. Late spring (May to early June) and early autumn (September to October) are the most forgiving: soft light, tables outside the cafés, and no crowds. Summer turns Barcola into the city’s beach and brings out the Italian holiday rituals, with long aperitivi on the rive and the sea breeze keeping the heat tolerable. Winter is when Trieste shows its most cinematic face: empty caffè, dramatic light, and the famous Bora wind blowing in gusts that can pass 150 km/h. Pack a windproof layer, but if you don’t mind being knocked sideways occasionally, this is when the city feels most like itself.