Trieste

The Veneti seem to have given the town its name, Tergeste, from a word meaning market, and Rome took it in 177 BC; under Julius Caesar it became a Roman colony, and Augustus walled it in 33–32 BC, leaving the Arco di Riccardo. It submitted to Charlemagne in 788. In the 13th and 14th centuries Trieste competed with Venice for sea trade and was occupied by it twice, and in 1382 its leading citizens placed the city under the protection of Leopold III of Habsburg, beginning more than five centuries of Austrian rule.

Its fortunes turned in 1719, when Emperor Charles VI made it a free port, and under Maria Theresa it prospered; Serbs, Greeks, Jews and others settled and built churches and palaces. After brief French occupations it became Austria's main port: Austrian Lloyd was founded here in 1836, the Southern Railway from Vienna arrived in 1857, and by 1911 Trieste was the fourth-largest city of Austria-Hungary. It was also a cosmopolitan literary city, where James Joyce taught English from 1904 to 1915 and Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba wrote.

Italy annexed the city after the First World War. In 1920 the Slovene cultural centre was burned down, and in 1930 and 1941 Slovene activists were tried by the Fascist special tribunal. Under German occupation the Risiera di San Sabba became a concentration camp, and in 1945 Yugoslav forces held the city for forty days, during which hundreds of Italians and anti-Communist Slovenes were arrested and many were killed. From 1947 Trieste was the centre of the Free Territory of Trieste under Allied military government, and in 1954 the city returned to Italy; the border was settled in 1975.

Trieste sits where Latin, Slavic and Germanic Europe meet, and its nicknames — "Vienna by the sea", the city of coffee, the city of the bora — reflect it. The coffee house is an institution: Caffè San Marco, opened in 1914, and the older literary cafés were frequented by Joyce, Svevo and Saba, whose statue stands at the end of Via San Nicolò, where Joyce lived and taught at the Berlitz school. The writers Claudio Magris and Susanna Tamaro and the travel writer Jan Morris are also tied to the city, and Bloomsday is celebrated every June.

The city's diversity shows in its places of worship — the Serbian Orthodox church of Saint Spyridon, the Greek Orthodox church of San Nicolò, one of Europe's largest synagogues, and Lutheran, Anglican, Waldensian and Armenian churches. The Slovene community has its own theatre, open since 1902, and its daily newspaper, Primorski dnevnik, and Slovene is widely used in Opicina and other Karst villages. The Teatro Verdi stages opera, and the city hosts film festivals in January and November.

Sailing is the defining sport: the Barcolana, first held in 1969, is the world's largest sailing race by number of participants. US Triestina finished second in Serie A in 1947–48, and the city has strong basketball and handball clubs; Michael Jordan famously shattered a backboard at an exhibition game here in 1985. In 2012 Lonely Planet named Trieste the world's most underrated travel destination.

About 199,000 people lived in Trieste in 2026, a population that has been ageing — almost 29 per cent are over 65 — and shrinking in relative terms since the city joined Italy. Some 18 per cent of residents are immigrants, the largest groups born in Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Kosovo and Ukraine.

The port is the economic engine. It is one of Italy's largest, a deep-water gateway for Central Europe whose oil terminal feeds the Transalpine Pipeline, supplying 40 per cent of Germany's energy needs and most of Austria's, and it handles more than 40 per cent of Italy's coffee, roasted by firms such as Illy and Hausbrandt. Assicurazioni Generali has its headquarters here, as does Fincantieri. Since the 1960s science has become a second pillar: the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, SISSA, the Elettra synchrotron and dozens of other institutes give Trieste the highest proportion of researchers in Europe, and the university, founded in 1924, has about 23,000 students.

Daily life moves between the café and the sea. At lunchtime and in the evening, residents and students head for the Barcola promenade to swim, sunbathe and meet friends, in every season. A cruise terminal stands beside Piazza Unità, and the port is being promoted as a terminal for new trade corridors to Asia and the Middle East.

Trieste eats in a Central European way, shaped by the Austrians, Slovenes, Serbs, Hungarians and others who settled here. The buffet is its characteristic eating house: staff carve platters of boiled pork — the caldaia — with cold cuts, mustard and horseradish, for a lunch or a snack. The emblematic dish is jota, a soup of beans, sauerkraut or sour turnip, potatoes, bacon and spare ribs, usually made with olive oil and seasoned with garlic, and considered the prime example of Triestine food.

Other traditional dishes include minestra de bisi spacai, a split-pea soup; rotolo di spinaci in straza, a spinach roll; sardoni impanai, breaded anchovies, prized when they are the white-fleshed sardoni barcolani caught off Barcola; capuzi garbi, sauerkraut; Vienna sausages, goulash, ćevapi and frito misto of fried fish. On the Karst, farmhouses open osmize for short periods, selling their own wine and produce.

Desserts are Austrian and Hungarian in spirit: presnitz, one of the richer Easter variants of the pinza; fave triestine, small almond sweets eaten at carnival; struccolo de pomi, apple strudel; kugelhupf; rigo jancsi; and the Easter pinza and titola, the latter decorated with a hard-boiled egg. Coffee has its own rules, with the capo in B served in a glass, and the village of Prosecco, which gave its name to the famous sparkling wine, lies within the city limits; local wines include Terrano, Vitovska and Malvasia.