Beautiful and cultured, Trieste is Italy’s most cosmopolitan city. There are still echoes of the glorious Habsburg past that made it “the little Vienna on the sea”. Its characteristic mixture of languages, peoples and religions combines Central European and Mediterranean souls.

The heart of the city is the most beautiful and most symbolic of all its squares, Piazza Unità d’Italia. The buildings around it perfectly summarise Trieste’s history. However, the most spectacular side of the square is the one facing the sea, from which a pier, the Molo Audace, extends for over two hundred metres. The Gulf of Trieste, constantly blown by strong winds is one of the sailors’ favourite: it is home of the Barcolana, the most crowded sailing race in the world.

Trieste is also the city of coffee. A free port for coffee imports from the 18th century onwards, the port of Trieste is still the busiest in the Mediterranean. In Trieste, coffee rhymes with literature: the city has numerous beautiful literary cafés, time-honoured coffee houses with a retro charm. They were once the haunt of great novelists such as James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba and are still the preferred watering-holes of writers and intellectuals.