Trieste

Introduction

Trieste is a city and seaport in the far northeast of Italy, sitting where the country meets the Adriatic. It serves as the capital of the autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and of the regional decentralization entity that shares its name, which gives it an administrative weight beyond its size.

For a traveller, that position at the edge of the country shapes the city's character: this is a place defined by its port and its borderland setting rather than by the classic Italian tourist trail.

Before you go

Trieste sits at a crossroads of cultures, with German-speaking central Europe to the north, Slavic and Balkan influences to the east, Italy and the Latin world to the west, and the Mediterranean to the south. That border-town position shapes everything you'll see: Roman remains near the sea, Austrian imperial architecture across the centre that recalls Vienna, and a Mediterranean atmosphere layered with influences from the city's past as a major 18th-century port.

The surrounding region is officially quadrilingual — Italian, Slovene, Friulian and German — though in Trieste itself signs are generally in Italian only, since the city is largely Italian-speaking and its local dialect is Triestine, a form of Venetian. In nearby villages and towns you'll often hear Slovene, and around the city you may also come across Croatian, Serbian, Romanian and Albanian. Trieste has a long-standing reputation as one of Italy's safest cities, with few problems walking at night, taking taxis or worrying about pickpockets, but take the usual precautions and watch for drivers, who tend to assume they own the road. The area around the main railway station has drawn attention as a stop on migrant routes, so simply looking confident and avoiding eye contact is usually enough to steer clear of trouble.

Getting there

Trieste is served by Trieste – Friuli Venezia Giulia Airport, a regional airport about 33 km north of the city centre with flights from various Italian and European cities. From the airport, APT bus number 51 runs to Trieste's bus station next to the railway station, taking roughly 55 minutes; on weekdays buses leave at 5 and 35 minutes past the hour, while Sunday services run every one to two hours. Tickets can be bought at city bus and coach stations or at the airport, where there is a self-ticketing machine in the Arrivals Hall and a Post Office. Trieste Airport railway station sits in front of the airport on the Trieste–Venice line, about a 25-minute ride into the city, and taxis wait outside the Arrivals Hall. For a wider choice of flights, use Venice Marco Polo or Venice Treviso, then take the Fly Bus express service to Mestre railway station and a regional train from there to Trieste Centrale. Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Pula and Rijeka in Croatia, are also within about two hours by private or public transport.

By train, Trieste Centrale is the main station, around 15 minutes on foot from Piazza Unità d'Italia, and has a left luggage office. Regional trains connect it with Venice, Udine and Ljubljana, the latter requiring a change at Villa Opicina, with some daily services to Carnia and Tarvisio. Intercity trains run to Rome and cities of central Italy such as Florence, Arezzo, Orte and Orvieto, while high-speed Freccia Rossa services link Turin, Milan and Rome, and an Italo service heads for Florence, Rome and Naples. ÖBB provides a daily direct connection to Villach, Graz and Wien, with additional options via a change at Villach or Udine. Other stations in the municipality are Trieste Miramare, serving Miramare Castle, and Villa Opicina, from which regional services depart for Ljubljana. By coach, the Trieste coach station has connections across Slovenia (including Izola, Koper, Ljubljana, Piran, Portorož, Postojna and Sežana), Croatia (including Dubrovnik, Poreč, Pula, Opatija, Rijeka, Rovinj, Split and Zadar) and Serbia (Belgrade), with Germany and Austria reachable via Flixbus; local routes include Udine, Grado and San Candido/Innichen. By car, the A4 Venice–Trieste motorway is joined via the Monfalcone-Lisert toll gate and the "Sistiana" exit on the SS 14 "Costiera", and other approaches include the SS 202 Triestina from the Carso Plateau and Opicina, the SS 15 Via Flavia from the Rabuiese border with Slovenia, and the SS 58 Carniola highway from Ljubljana via the Fernetti border.

Getting around

Trieste is a compact city, and much of what you will want to see can be reached on foot. A stroll through town to admire the ancient architecture is a popular activity in itself, letting you travel at your own pace and stop for coffee along the way. If you are not carrying luggage, there is no need to take a bus.

The public transport network is built mainly around buses. Schedules are generally accurate on Google Maps and timetables are available on the web; routes are frequent through the day but rarer in the evening, on Sundays and holidays. Many stops have screens showing live bus times. Contactless bank cards can be used to pay fares on board, and the system should charge no more than the cheapest paper tickets would have cost for your travel, including transfers. Paper tickets can be bought from tobacconists and from machines at some of the busier stops, and must be validated on first use by scanning the printed QR code at the machine in the door area; entry and exit use different doors, marked with symbols. Inspections are common on certain lines. Strikes occasionally affect buses, but most places of interest can still easily be reached on foot.

• The Opicina tramway is regarded as an attraction in its own right: for the initial climb out of the city centre it is coupled to a remote-controlled funicular tractor, winding along narrow, steep streets with views down towards Trieste and the Adriatic Sea. From Opicina it is a 15-minute walk to the railway station for trains to Ljubljana. Its recent history has been troubled, so check locally before planning a trip around it.
• Trieste Centrale railway station is around 15 minutes on foot from Piazza Unità d'Italia, with a left luggage office, and connects the city to the rest of Italy and beyond. Other stations in the municipality include Trieste Miramare, which serves Miramare Castle, and Villa Opicina.
• For a small extra fee, an FVG Card bought at the tourist office in Piazza Unità d'Italia gives you unlimited bus and tram service.

Where to stay

For help finding a room, the tourist information office in Piazza Unità can supply a list of accommodation and will even make bookings on your behalf, as well as hand out free maps.

• On the budget side, the Tergeste Youth Hostel sits on Viale Miramare out towards Grignano, reachable by bus from Oberdan Square; the ride passes the railway tracks and the beach at Barcola, and the hostel itself stands just a few metres from the Adriatic. It has dorm beds, an indoor restaurant, and a snack-bar and restaurant on a panoramic terrace.
• Also inexpensive is B&B Adria in Sistiana, close to Castle Duino and the Rilke Promenade above the Duino Cliffs nature reserve, with good public transport links to both the airport and the centre; breakfast is included and the staff are friendly and helpful.
• Mid-range options cluster in the centre. Hotel Porta Cavana, on Via Felice Venezian, is close to Piazza Unità and its rooms come with CD players and cable TV. Hotel Roma occupies a 19th-century building on Via Ghega, with a hotel bar and business facilities. The DoubleTree by Hilton Trieste, on Piazza della Repubblica, is a four-star property in a grand building with rooms and suites, meeting rooms, a spa and fitness centre, a restaurant and a bar. The NH Jolly Trieste is on Corso Cavour.
• For a splurge, the Greif Maria Theresia on Viale Miramare is an elegant hotel a few minutes by car from the centre, with an indoor swimming pool.

Food & drink

Trieste's food reflects the many populations that have passed through the city, with Austrian and Slavic traditions showing up in its restaurants, known locally as "buffets". Look for dishes such as caldaia, boiled pork; jota, a soup of pork, potatoes, cabbage and finely ground beans; gnocchi made in the Austrian style, sometimes with ham or stuffed with plums; brodetto, a fish soup; and sardoni in savor, flavoured pilchards. Salads here often feature chicory and rocket. On the plateau, farmers once sold their own products during an eight-day period permitted by imperial decree, giving rise to the osmizze, where you can taste local wines along with products such as Monrupino's tabor cheese and honey from San Dorligo. Pastry shops offer local takes on Austrian cakes, including Sacher torte, krapfen and strucolo cotto and strucolo de pomi, as well as chiffeletti, cookies made with flour, eggs and potatoes and fried in oil. At Easter, look for pinza, a sweet leavened bread still prepared at home and taken to the bakery to be cooked, with richer variants such as titola, decorated with a hard-boiled egg, putizza and presnitz. During Carnival, fritole and fave are typical.

Coffee has been an important part of Trieste since the 1700s, and the city's historic caffè are known as much for their patrons as for their food and drink. Among them are Caffè Tommaseo, Caffè San Marco, open since 1914, Caffè Torinese, Caffè Pasticceria Pirona, one of the few remaining petesserias to keep its Viennese charm, Caffè degli Specchi on Piazza Unità d'Italia, and Chocolat, a must for hot chocolate in winter and chocolate ice cream in summer. Locals usually drink their coffee at the bar as a capo in B, a small cappuccino served in a glass cup that you will only find in Trieste. Local specialties to try include Frambua, made from framboise with mint and tamarind, grappa, and Terrano wine, alongside other popular local wines such as Rosso, Malvasia and the white Vitovska Garganja.

What to see and do

Trieste rewards walking, and much of what you'll want to see sits close together. Start with the Città Vecchia, the old town, where narrow, crooked lanes thread between medieval houses and nearly the whole area is closed to traffic. Just uphill, the Roman Theatre faces the sea at the foot of San Giusto hill, and the Arco di Riccardo, an Augustan gate built into the Roman walls, stands in the narrow streets of the old town. Higher still are San Giusto Cathedral and Castle, built by the Habsburgs between the 15th and 17th centuries; a walk on the ramparts and bastions gives you a full panorama of the city, its hills and the sea, and you can also reach it by the elevator at the underground carpark of Park San Giusto on Via del Teatro Romano. Nearby, centred on Piazza della Cattedrale, are the fragmentary remains of the Roman Forum, the heart of ancient Tergeste, along with the Lapidary Garden and its Roman and medieval relics. The Austrian Quarter holds the grandest architecture, above all Piazza Unità, a majestic sea-front square lined with Neoclassical, Art Nouveau, Eclectic and Baroque buildings. In the Borgo Teresiano district, the Neoclassical church of Sant'Antonio Taumaturgo dominates the end of the Canal Grande, where you can step onto the bridge to pose with a bronze statue of James Joyce. Further out, Miramare Castle is a short trip from Piazza Oberdan on the #6 bus, with its chambers, throne room, stables used for temporary exhibitions, old greenhouses, and a park of botanical species and sculptures; the Little Castle there houses aquariums and the direction of the Natural Marine Reserve. The Victory Lighthouse, topped by an embossed copper statue of Victory with the anchor of the torpedo-boat Audace beneath it, serves both as a navigation light for the gulf and as a monument to the fallen of World War I.

For museums, the Museo Revoltella, donated to the city by Baron Pasquale Revoltella and housed in a building restored and extended by Carlo Scarpa, holds one of Italy's finest collections of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art. The Museum of History and Art and Lapidary Garden gathers archaeological, historical and art collections, from prehistoric finds to Roman and medieval sculpture, epigraphs and antiquities. You can also visit the Museum of Natural History, the Museo Sartorio with its paintings and sketches by Giambattista Tiepolo, the museum of the Jewish community with its ritual silverware and fabrics, and the Risiera di San Sabba, a national monument and testimonial of the only Nazi extermination camp in Italy. The Museo della Bora, dedicated to the wind, opens by email reservation. Outside the city, the Grotta Gigante is reached by city bus #42 and explored on a multilingual guided tour, with the Museum of Speleology nearby; reservation in advance is required. To relax, head for Molo Audace, the long pier across from Piazza Unità and a fine place to watch the sunset, or Barcola, the concrete, sandless beach south of Miramare, where you can sunbathe. Above the city, the Karst plateau is ideal for walking and offers excellent views of the Gulf of Trieste, coastal Slovenia and northern Croatia, with Opicina as its principal town; the Strada Vicentina, a pedestrian road from Opicina to Prosecco, stretches about 6 km with superb views. You can also take half-day or full-day sailboat cruises around the gulf.

When to go

Trieste has a humid subtropical climate, with cool winters and hot summers, and rain spread fairly evenly through the year. The bora, the wind that recurs here, shapes much of the weather you'll experience. In winter, daytime highs sit below the Mediterranean average, and days alternate between sunny, windy spells driven by the bora and rainy days. The bora can push temperatures below zero, and snow falls on a couple of days a year.

Summer is very warm, with hot nights warmed by the seawater. Rain still falls even in the warmest months, so there is no true summer drought to plan around.

Three days in Trieste

Day one: Start in Trieste itself, a city on the Adriatic where Italian, German, Slavic, Balkan, Latin and Mediterranean currents meet. The centre is compact and walkable, so you can spend your first hours simply getting your bearings among the streets and squares. Trieste's character owes much to its Austrian past, when Vienna shaped the city's architecture and outlook, and you will notice that inheritance alongside Slovene, Friulian, Triestine, Venetian, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian and Albanian threads in the everyday life of the place.

Day two: Use the city as your base for understanding the wider region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and its position between Italy, Europe and the Adriatic. The mix of Italian, German, Slavic, Balkan and Mediterranean influences is not a museum piece here; it is the ordinary texture of the streets, markets and cafés. Take your time rather than rushing between sights, and let the overlapping languages and histories of Trieste and its neighbours set the pace.

Day three: Plan your departure with the region's transport in mind. Friuli Venezia Giulia Airport serves the area, and you can also connect via Venice Marco Polo or Venice Treviso if your route runs through Venice. At the airport, APT tickets are available, including on Sunday, from the Arrivals Hall and the Post Office. Allow time for the transfer so your last day stays unhurried.