Intrigue, by Trieste : Uncoverign the easy charm, beauty of overlooked city

The middle-age man behind the hotel reception desk speaks no English, or if he does he’s not admitting it. When we ask if he might recommend a restaurant nearby he waves vaguely in a leftward direction. Evidently there are ristoranti to the left. In Florence and Venice when we proffered the same question we were met with bubbling eagerness, penciled directions and a phone call to reserve a table. We’re not complaining. People had said we would find Trieste “different.”

We’re innocents on the trodden tourist trail, wallowing in the glories of the Italian Renaissance, except that with two blank, un-inked-in days before the flight back home, we have chosen to see Trieste. On a map it’s in Italy’s top right-hand corner on the border with the former Yugoslavia. It now borders the independent state of Slovenia and lies not more than 25 miles from the northwest tip of Croatia.

Is our receptionist perhaps not Italian but a melancholy Slav? Nobody urged us to visit Trieste. Indeed, when we asked Italy enthusiasts if we should take a look at this cosmopolitan city, eyebrows lifted in puzzlement. No smiting the brow and crying out, “Si, yes, you must go to Trieste!” Our suspicion grew that few Italians and fewer Americans had ever seen Trieste.

But the idea of Trieste intrigues me as a city of intrigue. Remember those 1930s stories of spies and skulduggery in Central Europe? Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” the espionage novels of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene? I picture Trieste as a stopover for the Orient Express, crossroads between Central Europe and the Mediterranean haunt of Greeks, Turks, Albanians, Slavs, Jews, stiff-upper-lip Brits and out-of-their-depth Americans, all with briefcases stuffed with money and secrets, meeting clandestinely in coffeehouses and, soon after, discovered dead.

At least we’ll not want for culture: Roman ruins, art galleries, museums, neoclassical architecture and an opera house, a scaled-down La Scala, Teatro Verdi, named for Giuseppe Verdi, who composed two operas for it. James Joyce ran away to Trieste in 1905 with Nora Barnacle, the young Galway woman he would marry 26 years later. Joyce may not have been ecstatically happy in Trieste, but he stayed 10 years, writing, teaching English and scrounging money. One of his pupils was the novelist Iralo Svevo, born in Trieste and killed in a car crash. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived for a while in a castle near the city. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, father of modern art criticism, was stabbed to death in Trieste in 1768.

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The two-hour train ride from Venice is through a fertile, flat, fairly dull landscape with none of the gorgeousness of the cypresses and red-roofed villages of the Tuscan hills we left a few days ago. The train slows. There below on the blue Adriatic Sea, besieged by green hills, lies Trieste. Gray buildings and white cliffs glint in the sun. The view already justifies the visit.

So does the food. No thanks to a certain world-weary receptionist, we light on an unpretentious hostelry, Trattoria al Pescatori, where the absence of English doesn’t matter because by this point in our tour we’re adept at picking our way through Italian menus. Also, this menu is in five languages: Italian, French, German, English and, it says, Yugoslav. Does that mean Slovenian? Serbo-Croatian? Some of the English reads oddly. Fish on offer includes toadfish, gilthead, dentex, yolk prawns and swimming-bell. The menu offers plenty of pork but we go for misto mare (mixed fish), then lasagna. Delicious, every mouthful. Salad is trolleyed up on a cart. The bill for two: 56,000 lire--about $40--including wine and service.

And speaking of food, the next day at Birreria Forst we knuckle under and do as the Triestines do, some of them anyway. For starters, assorted salamis, prosciutto, sliced sausage, a cheese named Liptauer, Russian salad, gherkins and olives. Main course, Kaiserfleisch: three hot sausages, each different; ham (three sorts); bacon; sauerkraut and mashed potatoes. Dessert: a 3-inch-high strudel with apple, raisins and pine nuts. We could be in Vienna.

Trieste, biggest seaport on the Adriatic, is a modern university town with 227,000 inhabitants, vast shipbuilding yards and oil pipelines linking it to Austria and Bavaria. Geographically and culturally it stands remote and sequestered from the rest of Italy, a little forlorn, faded, forsaken. Its glory days as chief seaport of the Hapsburg Empire are long gone.

Time and again, Trieste has changed hands. Julius Caesar made it a colony of Rome. After the Romans came Goths, Lombards, Byzantines and Franks. In the 12th and 13th centuries, prosperous Trieste became a free port with commercial advantages to outsiders, as it often would be again when given the chance. But the Venetians seized it, and to get them out Trieste put itself under the protection of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For five centuries the Hapsburgs ruled the city, apart from a spell under Spanish domination and three occupations by Napoleon. Only with the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918 did Trieste, a city of Italians with an entrenched Slav and German culture, become united with Italy. After World War II, the United Nations ran Trieste as a free territory, a city without a country. In 1954 it was returned to Italy but without much of its hinterland, which was awarded to Yugoslavia.

All Italians--Romans, Sicilians, Florentines, Bolognese, Genoese, whoever and wherever--see themselves as different from all other Italians, and quite rightly. If history is a factor as it has to be, Triestines must be the most different of all.

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A new shift at the reception desk, a genial couple with decent English, give us directions to the tourist office, which we shall need if we’re to make sense of Trieste in two days. We need almost two days to track it down, several times walking past it and failing to find anyone who can pinpoint it. Trieste is not, nor was it ever, a tourist town. Its prosperity is tied to shipping, insurance, commerce, not least with Yugoslavia.

The tourist office, up the stairs at 20 Via San Nicolo, identities itself by a plaque so discreet that clearly the last thing it wants is to be discovered. The bearded man in charge ducks under the counter, but later surfaces, beaming, bearing wads of maps and booklets, which he stows in a laminated Trieste bag classier than anything that came our way in the tourist cities.

The ancient hilltop heart of the city, the Colla Capitolina (Capitoline Hill), has a 14th century basilica, the Basilica di San Giusto; remnants of a 15th century castle, Castello di San Giusto; and a panorama of piazzas, palaces and the sea. Nothing in our tourist literature enlightens us about San Giusto--Saint Justus--beyond his being Trieste’s patron saint, martyred in AD 303 by being thrown into the ocean.

A Roman theater facing the sea and diligently cared for, once seated 6,000 fans of gladiator combat. From time to time concerts and plays take place here, but Triestines tend not to flock to them, a Triestine tells us, because they don’t like sitting on slabs of stone.

We’d thought ourselves churched-out by the treasure-trove of Italy’s Renaissance cities. But Trieste’s variety rekindled enthusiasm: Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Evangelical, in a plethora of architectural styles from Romanesque, Baroque, neoclassical, neo-Gothic and neo-Byzantine to the avant-garde, trapezoidal Santuario di Monte Grisa on a hill behind the city. A 1919 Jewish temple patterned on Syrian models, and huge, is said to be one of the most important synagogues in Europe.

And beside the temple, a coffeehouse! The Caffe San Marco has been restored to its Hapsburg glory by an insurance company at a cost of $2 million. We look in on the mahogany, marble and mirrors.

Instead, we take a table under a canvas awning in the arboreal tunnel that is the Viale XX Settembre, a traffic-free street of relaxed activity that might have been imported from Paris. A cappuccino, perhaps? (Be advised, a cappuccino in Trieste is a small coffee with a drop of milk, not a big, milky coffee as in the rest of Italy.)

A table at the elegant, old-world Caffe degli Specchi on the Piazza Unita d’Italia is the spot for seeing and being seen. The piazza is an immense rectangle open to the ocean. Across from the coffeehouse is the exclusive Hotel Duchi d’Aosta and around the corner, facing the sea, the Savoia For travelers needing to catch their breath after the bruising overload of Renaissance Italy, here is where to pause.

Excelsior, where we test the grappa, the Italian brandy with a footballer’s kick. Antonio, the head barman, shows us a photograph of himself in 1951 as a novice barman, behind the same bar, serving American soldiers.

Our spotless budget hotel, Al Teatro, is a minute’s walk from the Piazza Unita d’Italia and close to the opera. Feel free to burst into song. Musicians frequent Al Teatro. We hear a piano and from the floor below, a soprano trilling her scales.

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Excursions? A few miles from the city are castles and a huge cave, the Grotta Gigante, roomy enough to hold St. Peter’s Cathedral, with stalagmites and stalactites up to 50 feet long.

The small village of Duino is about 10 miles north of Trieste along the sea. The fairy-tale Duino Castle, where Rilke stayed, is private but has splendid walks, views and cliffs where peregrine falcons nest. Part of the castle is the home of the United World College of the Adriatic, where 200 students from all over the world finish their high school education.

Miramare Castle, near the train station, is dazzlingly white and set in a splendid park. Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg, younger brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, built it in the 1850s for himself and his wife, Carlotta of Belgium, filled it with art treasures, then accepted the crown of Mexico, not the least because Carlotta coveted the title of Empress. For three years Maximilian was Emperor of Mexicobut the Mexicans didn’t want him, the United States certainly didn’t want him and, in 1867, Mexico’s republican army executed him. He was 35. Carlotta went insane, but lived for 60 more years.

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Back in Trieste, a city that, in its own faintly rejected way, survives and thrives. For travelers needing to catch their breath after the bruising overload of Renaissance Italy, here is where to pause. We will remember fondly the charm of an easy-paced city, friendly if sometimes mournful Triestines, fine buildings, sailboats, mighty ferries and surprises everywhere.

A toast to Trieste, I say. Long may she remain neglected.

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GUIDEBOOK: The Trieste Factor

Getting there: There is no nonstop or direct service from LAX to Trieste, Italy. Alitalia connects through Rome; USAir connects to Air Dolomiti in Munich. Nonstop fares begin at about $1,280, including tax.

Where to stay: Hotel Duchi d’Aosta, Piazza Unita d’Italia 2, 34121; tel. 011-39-40-7600011, fax 011-39-40-366092; about $240 for a double room. Handsome 19th century building, sitting rooms with Venetian chandeliers, great location.

Starhotel Savoia Excelsior, Riva del Mandracchio, 1-34124; tel. 011-39-40-77-941, fax 011-39-40-638260; double, about $210.

Al Teatro, Capo di Piazza G. Bartoli, 34100, tel. 011-39-40-366220; about $100, double. Bright, ample rooms with modernized baths; favored by performers at nearby Teatro Verdi.

For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles 90025, (310) 820-0098; fax (310) 820-6357.

--M.K.