Since you last heard from us, we’ve been meandering here and there: a bit of London, a bit of Italy, a bit of Norway. We settled in Trieste, in the northeast corner of Italy, for a couple of months, so here are some brief thoughts on it.
Trieste is full of hills. Fun story: when we arrived at the train station, we couldn’t find a taxi stand anywhere. Okay, we thought; we’re minimalists so we ought to be able to carry our own luggage. We googled it and it was only about a twenty minute walk. Well, it turns out that twenty minutes was straight up, and also down. First we ran into a Roman theatre (Trieste = Roman Tergestum). We thought there must be a way around this. There was, but it turned out to be up a giant staircase, past a cathedral, down a giant staircase, and then down three more smaller staircases.
Trieste is not so much like the rest of Italy, as you can tell from looking at it on a map. We’re very close to the Slovenian border, and that shows itself in dozens of ways, most obviously the food. (Yes of course we’re going to talk about food – it’s the third paragraph already!) You will find typical pasta dishes, plus the polenta of the north, but also gnocchi and filled dumplings, plus something called frico, a massive cheesy potato pancake (served with polenta, obviously). We hadn’t known this before arriving, but the architecture makes clear that it was once Hapsburg territory. Indeed, Trieste was the port of Vienna for over a century.
James Joyce spent time here. We knew this before arriving, but it’s fun to see references to him everywhere, including the Scala Dublino (i.e., Dublin Staircase), up which he took his kids to school every morning. Plus the occasional statue. Other famous Triestini are the writer Italo Svevo and the poet Umberto Saba. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, generally considered the father of art history, got himself murdered here, in a most sketchy way. And then he gave his name to the museum, which has the cutest rhyton (drinking cup) we’ve ever seen. Trieste feels as though it’s fairly out of the way, and yet, it’s also a crossroads. Jan Morris loved it here. Even Archduke Franz Ferdinand popped by, after his assassination. In his coffin, of course, on the way to Vienna.
But perhaps our favourite thing about Trieste is that the tourist attractions are limited. There’s stuff to see, but most people don’t bother to come here. Aside from the Roman theatre and some museums, there’s a fortress, a couple of old cathedrals, and of course, the waterfront. But nothing on anybody’s bucket list. Except maybe Miramar, the castle Maximilian built on the water nearby.
So it’s just us and the locals and the cruise ships, which stop here now that they’re not allowed into Venice any longer. (But even the cruise ships don’t seem to be as bad as they are in other places; we suspect everyone just hops on the bus and leaves town.) All in all, Trieste has given us a fabulous chance to work on our Italian. As well as our quadriceps.
