There is something special about Trieste, the polyglot city tucked away in the north-easternmost corner of Italy's Adriatic coast.
I first came across the name many years ago, while reading a biography of James Joyce, who spent more than a decade in this pretty port city teaching English. The very name of Trieste invokes a certain mystique, a sense of nostalgy, and it immediately set my imagination alight: the name seemed to personify some long-lost grandeur, sadness, and a misplaced sense of identity and loyalty.
Indeed, in Trieste you will find a little bit of everything above. The city is a fascinating mixture of hugely contrasting traditions and heritage. Located at the crossroad between the old West and the old East, Trieste was, until the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, little more than a peripheral frontier city on the East-West conflict zone. Yet at the same time, it has always been a city of many cultures, a truly cosmopolitan ethnic mix-pot located right at the heart of Europe and beyond, thanks to its position on the tip of the Adriatic Sea. Barely 15 minutes by car from the Slovenian border, Trieste is the true gateway to the Balkan.
Like many other European cities located in the border region and ruled by different regimes in the past, Trieste is known by at least 3 names: Trieste (in Italian), Triest (German), and Trst (Slovene). And the character of the city is just as multi-folded and distinctive as her past heritage suggested.
In its heydays, Trieste enjoyed great prosperity thanks to its status as the land-locked Austro-Hungarian Empire 's only deep-water port (and sole access to sea). Goods and merchandise from all over the world were imported into Trieste and shipped to Vienna, Prague, Budapest and other major cities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Of all things, coffee trade played a dominant role in Trieste's economic life, supplying the elite Viennese society and her elegant fin-de-siecle coffee houses with top grade beans from South America, Africa and other regions. Even after the decline and disintegration of the Austor-Hungrian Empire in the post-1918 years, the import and processing of coffee remains the mainstay of Trieste's socio-economic cycle. The city is home to numerous coffee importers, traders, roasters, tasters, as well as one of the most prestigeous name in the world of coffee - illy caffe s.p.a.
This extraordinary taste for top-of-the-range coffee is evident everywhere in Trieste: very few cities in the world offer such high concentration of stylish cafes and sophisticated traditional coffee houses per sqaure meter. At virtually every turn of the corner, there is a place where you can sit down, relax and start your day with a wonderful cup of espresso. The city takes pride in her reputation as the world's gourment coffee capital, where good coffee are not just the exclusive rights to a selected few, but are available at affordable prices. For 2 euro you can spend several hours reading a book in the tastefully decorated lounge of one of the historic coffee houses where, decades ago, influential 20th century literary figures and intellectuals including the likes of James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, Italian novelist Italo Svevo, poet Umberto Saba et al., sipped coffee and pondered over their intellectual creativity.
Following the fall of the Iron Curtain, Trieste's geographical location at the tip of the Istrian Peninsula makes it an attractive launching pad for those who are interested in visiting Slovenia and Croatia from Italy. The once isolated frontier city slowly regains her former status as a key transit nexus between the north and south of the Adriatic; frequent daily bus services operate from Trieste's central bus station to major Croatian, and Slovenian towns. There are also scheduled long-distance service to eastern Europe as far as Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. In the summer, ferry service run from Trieste to Croatian port towns of Pula, Rovinj, as well as the pretty Slovenia town of Piran.
The city centre of Trieste is composed of streets lined with grandiose Viennese style mansions and impressive Central European architectures, many of which were built by well-off merchants who made their fortunes from the coffee trade. More often than not, the town feels much more Central European than Italian thanks to her Austrian heritage. At the same time, you would hear Slovenian and Croatian spoken alongside Italian in many shops and public places, due to the presence of a sizeable Slovenian/Croatian ethnic population in the city. Although Trieste is perhaps not as well-endowed (in terms of the numbers of tourist attractions) or famous as the neighbouring tourist-magnet of Venice, for me Trieste is the more intellectually rewarding of the two: with much less crowds and a more authentic lifestyle, Trieste's charm - the eccentric mix of cultures and traditions - never cease to interest me.Copyrights 2010. All texts and photos by YC Cheng. All Rights Reserved.
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