Travel Postcard: 48 hours in Trieste, Italy

By Nigel Tutt
TRIESTE, Italy (Reuters Life!) - Got 48 hours to explore the central European melting pot which is the Italian port city of Trieste?
A Reuters correspondent with local knowledge helps visitors to get the most out of a visit to the city that only became definitively part of Italy in 1954 and where James Joyce wrote part of "Ulysses."
FRIDAY
8 p.m. - Drive down past cliffs and trees into the city of 200,000 people, a northeastern outpost of Italy with the Slovenian and Croatian borders not far away.
Drive past the rail station and just beyond the city center to L'Albero Nascosto. The small homely hotel, not from the seafront, boasts large rooms and breakfasts of cheese, bread and jams.
9 p.m. - Take a stroll along the seafront to get your bearings. Be ready for the wind, called the Bora, which often blows gustily across the city, sometimes at up to 160 km (100 miles) an hour.
Along the seafront a series of restaurants beckon. Upmarket is the Nastro Azzurro, which offers fish in traditional surroundings.
For those with tighter budgets, or with a more Germanic taste, there is a beer hall, the Birreria Lowenbrau, with a range of German-style beers, sausage and other meaty dishes.
SATURDAY
9 a.m. - To get a feel for the city's commercial roots in the 1800s, try the Museo Revoltella. Baron Pasquale Revoltella was a leader in making the city a center for trade and for insurance companies. His imposing home is a museum and the library, ballroom and sculptured entrance are particularly impressive. A modern art gallery is on the same site.
11 a.m. - Time for coffee and cake. Piazza dell'Unita d'Italia is the center of the city and home to Austrian-style coffee bars such as Caffe degli Specchi and the nearby Caffe Tommaseo with a ready array of creamy cakes. Coffee has to be the local Illy brand.
The piazza itself is a treasure and one of the largest three-sided squares facing the sea.
Noon - The tourist office in Piazza dell'Unita d'Italia offers a walking tour with audio guide which takes in all the important city center locations. They include squares, churches, museums, the San Giusto castle, the Roman theater, and the old Jewish ghetto.
The tourist office also offers a guided tour in the footsteps of Joyce, who lived in Trieste from 1904 to 1915 and taught English there. One of his students was Italo Svevo, who became one of Italy's leading modern writers.
Joyce returned after World War One, when the city had been transferred from Austria-Hungary to Italy, and lived there from 1919 to 1920. Continued...
Source: Reuters