Trieste Culture

Trieste is the least Italian-feeling city in Italy and is entirely conscious of it.

Coffee

The city is the country's coffee port and drinks the stuff on a Viennese model with a vocabulary nobody else uses: a nero is an espresso, a capo in b is a macchiato in a glass. The historic cafes are not nostalgia businesses; people work in them.

Writers

James Joyce spent a decade here from 1904, taught English, and wrote much of what became Ulysses; one of his pupils, Italo Svevo, wrote Zeno's Conscience. Umberto Saba kept an antiquarian bookshop that is still open, and Rilke wrote the first of the Duino Elegies at the castle along the coast.

Four communities

Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Lutheran and Jewish buildings all stand within a few streets, and the synagogue is among the largest in Europe. This was a trading city and it bought tolerance because tolerance was profitable.

Slovene Trieste

A Slovene-speaking minority has lived here and on the plateau for centuries, with its own schools, press and theatre, and a difficult twentieth century behind it.

Science

An international physics centre, a research university, a synchrotron and a marine biology station all sit within a few kilometres, a deliberate postwar decision to give a city that had lost its hinterland something else to be. It has worked.

The osmize

Karst farms are still allowed to open for a few weeks a year to sell their own wine and food, announced by a leafy branch hung at the roadside. The right dates from 1784.