Trieste

The Story Behind the Place

Trieste began as a Roman colony, Tergeste, founded in the 2nd century BC on the shore below the San Giusto acropolis, and it became a modest Roman port on the road to Aquileia. After the Roman fall it passed through Byzantine, Lombard and Frankish hands and declined to a fishing town under the Venetian shadow. The turning point came in 1382, when the city placed itself under the protection of the Habsburgs — the beginning of five centuries inside the Austrian orbit. In 1719 Emperor Charles VI declared Trieste a free port, and under Maria Theresa and her successors the city exploded from a provincial town into the empire’s principal outlet to the sea, drawing Italian, Slovene, German, Greek, Jewish and Armenian merchants into one of the great trading cities of 19th-century Europe. It was during this boom that the Piazza Unità palaces, the Grand Canal quarter and the coffee houses were built, and the city became a crucible of Central European culture: the writers Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba were Triestine, and James Joyce lived and taught here for a decade. After the First World War the city passed to Italy, losing much of its hinterland trade; after the Second it spent a decade as the Free Territory of Trieste under Anglo-American administration before returning to Italy in 1954. The port still works, and the borderland culture it built is the city’s defining character.