ce, Trieste is second to none. After having served as the most important port and fourth largest city of the Habsburg Empire for some seven centuries, Trieste became part of Italy following World War I, spent nearly a decade as an independent city state (the so-called Free Territory of Trieste) following World War II, and is now the capital and largest city of the Friuli Venezia Giulia autonomous region.
Trieste’s history is one of maritime commerce and transportation. The city is first and foremost, a port city and as a result, visitors should venture to the watery frontier. From the Porto Vecchio to less hectic refuges on the Adriatic Sea and Gulf of Trieste, the coast is the place to be.
Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in addition to neighbor Slovenia, is full of rock formations and caves. The Grotta Gigante is by far the most popular with visitors today. The cave complex is the most immense in the world, with one cavity large enough to fit St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
While the town museum of Trieste has a splendid collection of Roman artifacts cultivated from beneath the city over the decades, you can still see the remnants of the ancient past outside. The Roman Baths of Trieste are the most famous set of ruins in the region.
It took over 200 years to complete San Giusto Castle. The 15th century fortress looms over Trieste and is the focal point of a complex that contains many landmarks and the Cathedral of San Giusto.
Pedestrian Piazza Unita d’Italia is the heart and soul of Trieste. Full of character, charm and gorgeous architecture, the giant square is the ideal place to people-watch and slip into the pace of daily, local life in the city.
Though a remnant of the Fascist Regime in Italy, Trieste’s Faro della Vittoria, or Victory Lighthouse, is nonetheless one of the chief symbols of the city today.
The graceful city-centre area north of Corso Italia dates to the 18th-century reign of Empress Maria Theresa, including the photogenic Canal Grande . Reflecting centuries of religious tolerance, it's here you'll also find the mosaic-laden Serbian Orthodox Chiesa di Santo Spiridione (1868) juxtaposed with the neoclassical Catholic Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Taumaturgo (1842).
A former Nazi concentration camp, Museo della Risiera di San Sabba is now well-preserved as a museum and chronicles Trieste’s trials during the Second World War.
The story of Castello di Miramare, the fanciful neo-Gothic home of the hapless Archduke Maximilian of Austria, is an interesting one.
Maximilian came to Trieste in the 1850s as the commander-in-chief of Austria's imperial navy, an ambitious young aristocrat known for his liberal ideas. After chancing upon Miramare's site while sailing, he decided to build a home there. In 1864, while work was still in progress, he was talked into taking up the obsolete crown of Mexico, but after Benito Juárez re-established republican rule in 1867, Maximilian was shot by a firing squad. His wife, Princess Charlotte of Belgium, was so stricken with grief that she spent the rest of her life believing Maximilian was still alive, and only briefly returned to live at Miramare.
The house has remained essentially as she left it, a reflection of Maximilian's eccentric wanderlust along with the various obsessions of the imperial age: a bedroom is modelled to look like a frigate's cabin, there's ornate orientalist salons and a red silk-lined throne room. Upstairs, a suite of rooms used by the Anglophile military hero Duke Amadeo of Aosta in the 1930s is also intact, furnished in the Italian Rationalist style. Amadeo proved as ill-fated as Maximilian: appointed viceroy of Ethiopia in 1937, he was to die five years later in a British POW camp in Kenya.
10.11.2017