The dream of the 1800s is alive in Trieste

Trieste is the sort of place travel guides and writers recommend only after they’ve exhausted the possibilities of better-known destinations. Run out of things to say about Lake Como, Florence, and the Amalfi Coast? Trieste is there, lurking in the background, offering just enough intrigue and history to make it worth visiting, or at least writing about. It is the back alley of Italy. Rome, Florence, Venice, and other marquee destinations are the grand piazzas, monuments, and promenades. A glimpse at a map suggests that Trieste, tightly ringed by Slovenian territory and sitting at the northeast corner of the Adriatic, more properly belongs to the Balkans. 

This is not to say that Trieste is ugly or dangerous. There are charming neighborhoods and picturesque vistas and imposing statues. But the real satisfaction in visiting is derived from the knowledge that you’re traveling off the beaten path. Few European cities embody the dog days of summer like Trieste. The heat hangs over the city’s sedate harbor, once a bustling commercial port, and the Piazza Unità d’Italia, a vast marble expanse bereft of shade. Here, you can sit at bars and cafes to rival any in Europe for good time-wasting, sipping a Birra Dolomiti, a beer brewed nearby and named for the mountains that tower to the north. Cruise ships have recently returned, but that’s only because they were banned from nearby Venice, where locals are fed up with over-tourism.

The city has had a few brushes with history. Before he became the first and last ruler of the Second Mexican Empire, a luckless colonial venture that is now mostly remembered as the inspiration for Cinco de Mayo, Emperor Maximilian I lived in Trieste as an Austrian archduke. Several decades later, his equally unlucky cousin Franz Ferdinand stayed at Maximilian’s old Triestine palace in the spring of 1914 before his fateful trip to Sarajevo. After World War II, the city was a bone of contention between Italy and Yugoslavia and, by extension, the emerging Western and Eastern Cold War blocs. Before the matter was resolved in 1954 — Italy kept Trieste, and Yugoslavia got most of the surrounding territory — many feared that the contested city would be the spark that ignited World War III. 

Trieste survived these episodes mainly because it is a place of transit, a city for people trying to get somewhere else, which is one reason Venice’s decision to offload cruise passengers on its less celebrated neighbor is strangely fitting. The city has no glorious Roman past or Renaissance golden age to speak of. In 1719, Trieste suddenly became a major commercial center because the Habsburgs decided they wanted a port on the Adriatic, granting a previously unremarkable town extensive privileges and tax exemptions. In 1857, Karl Marx wrote that the place was run by “a motley crew of speculators.” Trieste, Marx continued, benefits from “not having any past,” an advantage in the fast-moving world of 19th-century commerce but a much less attractive feature in the modern era of global tourism.   

Over 150 years later, Trieste has acquired a past, though it is less obviously compelling than Renaissance Florence or Imperial Rome. Instead, Trieste offers a window into the rapidly receding world of 19th-century Europe, a continent of multiethnic empires, famous families, and venerable dynasties. When Franz Ferdinand left Trieste for Sarajevo, his journey meant not just the end of the Habsburgs, and the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns, but also the end of a political era. The meeting point of Italian, German, and Slavic influences under the old imperial dispensation quickly became a relic of the past. Dynastic rivalries were replaced by bitter national and ideological disputes. 

The old system was criticized, often justly, as repressive, reactionary, antidemocratic, and slipshod. What it had to recommend it was that it worked, at least for a time, to govern a very uneasy corner of Europe. “Austrian officials were honest — a unique experience for the Italians,” admitted the left-wing historian A.J.P. Taylor, an otherwise vociferous critic of the Habsburgs. The roiling cauldron of Slavs, Germans, and Italians in the northeastern corner of the Adriatic would prove to be a trouble spot from the dynasty’s dissolution to the beginning of the Cold War.    

Trieste is no longer an imperial port or geopolitical flashpoint, but there are reminders of its history if you look in the right places. Though his dynasty no longer rules northeastern Italy, an impressive statue of Emperor Maximilian still stands in a downtown plaza. Trieste’s neatly planned downtown and baroque architecture recall other former Habsburg cities such as Budapest, Ljubljana, and Krakow. A few signs still celebrate Trieste’s short-lived career as a “free city” under U.N. auspices after World War II.

When the Habsburg Empire collapsed, Trieste lost its raison d’etre. “But,” Jan Morris in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere writes, “for the drifter, it is just right.” Morris, a superb travel writer, was the latest in a long line of scribblers to drift through Trieste. James Joyce spent several happy years in the city before returning to Ireland, even writing much of Ulysses here. Late in his career, Sir Richard Burton was made British consul in Trieste to keep him out of trouble. 

Writing in 2001, Morris hopefully suggested that Trieste’s imperial past was a model for the European Union’s future. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, this prediction is almost touchingly naive. Trieste is quiescent, but nationalist politics have reemerged across Europe with a vengeance. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats and functionaries in Brussels lack the suppleness and charm of their imperial predecessors. 

Still, the city drifts on. There is one place in Trieste that can hold its own with Italy’s more famous sights. Naturally, it is touched by travel and melancholy. Maximilian’s snow-white palace of Miramar can be seen on a promontory just north of the city. When viewed from a distance through the summer haze, Miramar’s white stone walls look as if they might melt in the heat. As with Trieste itself, the palace is a place for people trying to get somewhere else. Maximilian himself never saw it completed. He sailed off on his ill-fated Mexican adventure before Miramar was ever finished. 

Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.