THE LURE OF TRIESTE

Northern Italy’s elegant and vibrant border city has long been an overlooked cultural gem. Now renewed interest in its port could bring a new era of prosperity.

- ROBERT DRAPER

BY ITALIAN STANDARDS, Trieste is strikingly diverse, owing both to its days as the AustroHungarian Empire’s thriving port city and to its location, tucked between central Europe and the Balkans. It is a borderland of merchants and transients, each leaving a cultural footprint.

One cloudless October morning, I headed from my rented flat in the working-class neighborhood of San Giacomo to the center of Italy’s 16th biggest city (population 200,121). On my way, I passed the ruins of a first-century Roman theater, a domed 19th-century Serbian Orthodox church, and a procession of African street vendors walking from the train station. The air off the Adriatic Sea was faintly saline, redolent as well of roasted coffee.

I had been to Trieste at least a dozen times since my first visit in 1996, but never for more than a day or two. A few glasses of Slovenian wine and acerbic dialogue with the bartender at Gran Malabar. Razor clams and truffles at Le Barettine. A hike across the rugged Carso plateau hovering over the sea, immersed in the blazing red feathery flowers of smoke trees. A whiff of something deeper but requiring no urgent response. Trieste would always be just as I left it—or so I believed until the spring of 2019, when Italy began to consider hitching the nation’s rickety economic wagon to China, with Trieste as its linchpin. Thereupon I began a monthlong stay, in hopes of finally understanding Italy’s peripheral city.