Discover Trieste

Trieste is the capital of Friuli Venezia Giulia, a city of roughly two hundred thousand people built on a narrow shelf between the Karst plateau and the Gulf of Trieste, with the Slovenian border on three sides.

Piazza Unità d'Italia, open to the sea on its fourth side, is the largest sea-facing square in Europe and the centre of the nineteenth-century city.

Behind it the Borgo Teresiano, laid out under Maria Theresa, is a grid of neoclassical blocks around a canal that once let ships unload at merchants' doors.

Above, on the hill, the cathedral of San Giusto and the castle mark the old Roman and medieval town; on a headland to the north stands Miramare, built in the 1850s for the Archduke Maximilian.

The Risiera di San Sabba, the only Nazi camp in Italy with a crematorium, is a national monument in the southern suburbs.

Trieste has more coffee per head, and more researchers per head, than any other Italian city.