Trieste Audio Tours

Trieste spent 150 years as the main seaport of the Habsburg Empire, which is why a city in the northeastern corner of Italy has a coffee culture, a cafe architecture, and a layered Central European identity that feels nothing like Venice or Milan. James Joyce arrived in 1904 with a borrowed fare, got drunk almost immediately, was arrested, and stayed for most of the next decade, teaching English and writing Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the early chapters of Ulysses in a succession of rented rooms. A walking circuit of Joyce's Trieste is one of the more intimate literary pilgrimages in Europe.

The Piazza Unita d'Italia -- the vast neoclassical square that opens directly onto the sea with no barrier between pavement and harbor -- is one of the genuinely affecting public spaces in Italy, its scale made stranger by the relative emptiness outside of summer.

Miramare Castle, completed in 1860 for Archduke Maximilian of Austria on a promontory 8 kilometers from the city center, looks exactly as a fairy-tale castle should: white limestone, turrets, sea on three sides, the unhappy story of its builder who briefly became Emperor of Mexico before his execution in 1867 adding an elegiac note to the beauty.