Why Trieste, Not Venice, Is Italy's Most Rewarding Literary City

Trieste sits in the far north-east corner of Italy, tucked against the Slovenian border at the head of the Adriatic, and it does not look or feel much like the rest of the country. Until 1918 it was the principal port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the grand, orderly architecture of its centre reflects that: broad Habsburg-era boulevards and a vast waterfront square rather than the tangled medieval lanes tourists expect from an Italian city. Piazza Unità d'Italia, ringed by 19th-century government and insurance-company palazzi, is often cited as the largest square in Europe that faces directly onto the sea, and it still functions as the city's civic stage.

A city writers kept passing through

That in-between quality, Italian by nationality but Central European by formation, is exactly what drew a run of major early-20th-century writers to Trieste, and what still separates it from Venice's more familiar postcard version of Italy. James Joyce lived in the city on and off between 1904 and 1920, teaching English at the Berlitz school and writing most of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there, along with substantial early work on Ulysses. He shared the city with the Triestine novelist Italo Svevo, a friend and one-time pupil, whose own fiction is now read as closely tied to the city's mixed, unsettled identity. A short way up the coast, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the opening of his Duino Elegies at Duino Castle in 1912, on a clifftop that is still open to visitors today.

The cafés are not a gimmick

Trieste's historic coffeehouses, several of them still trading under their original names and fittings, were where much of this literary life actually happened, and they remain genuinely functioning cafés rather than museum pieces. Caffè San Marco and Caffè degli Specchi both date to the era when Joyce and his contemporaries were in the city, and both are still ordinary places to read a newspaper over a coffee, which is a rarer thing to find intact in a well-known European city than it sounds.

Traveller tips

• Trieste Airport is a roughly 40-minute drive from the city centre; frequent trains also connect Trieste to Venice, around two hours away.
• Miramare Castle, a 19th-century seaside residence built for Archduke Maximilian, sits a short bus ride north of the centre and is open to visitors.
• The city's Habsburg-era cafés keep normal café hours and welcome anyone; no reservation or special access is needed.
• Trieste's bora wind can be genuinely strong in winter; check forecasts if planning outdoor time along the waterfront.