Castles on the Adriatic

Just along the coastline from Trieste is the gorgeous Castello di Miramare

built mid-1800s to be the summer home of Habsburg Archduke Maximilian of Austria and his wife princess Charlotte of Belgium.

Charlotte's royal family relations were legion: daughter of king Leopold I of Belgium (her brother became Leopold II, infamous for his brutal exploitation of the Congo), she was grand-daughter of the Queen of France and first cousin of both Queen Victoria and Albert, as well as of King Ferdinand of Portugal. And completing a triumph of genetic inbreeding, her husband Maximilian (younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria) was her second cousin.

None of this (or being one of the richest women in 19th century Europe) helped avert a bad ending for these two.

Maximilian, eager for a more impressive title, sailed off to the new world with Charlotte to take up the crown of Emperor of Mexico, made a series of poorly judged political and life choices (the least of which was sending home a request for 2000 caged nightingales) and was summarily shot dead by a firing squad.

Charlotte sailed home to live alone here at Miramare castle where she went certifiably mad.

And only a little further along this coastline, the thin finger at the bottom of Slovenia created to secure Trieste within Italy's borders ...

is Duino castle - in different style but more dramatically located on a cliff-top overlooking the Gulf of Trieste

Called Castello, Schloss or Grad - reflecting the fluid national borders of the last century - Duino belongs to the von Thurn und Taxis family.

It was also built as a summer home in the 19th century and the gardens and chapel have a distinctly Italian Tuscan feel.

There's a view down to the ruins of a much older castle from the 11th century.

Rilke famously spent a lot of time here, having an affair with princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis and wandering along these cliff-top trails - both inspiring him to write his Duino Elegies, considered his best work and dedicated to princess Marie.

I liked the family dining room ...

with french doors opening to a balcony

with these views down the cliffs

where swimmers were just visible, lazily floating in the calm sea.

These were my last views of the blue Adriatic before heading back north to the Alps.

Castello di Miramare and Castello di Duino, Gulf of Trieste, July 2016

Trieste, Adriatic city of nowhere

Trieste sits perched on the very edge of the deep blue Adriatic

as do Le Sartine, the little seamstresses, who dangle their legs above the waves on the sea wall in front of the sea-facing Piazza.

It was once the major commercial sea-port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

a legacy only too visible in the serious, imposing insurance company buildings, still headquartered here, that flank all three sides of the huge Piazza dell' Unità d'Italia

Assicurazioni Generali

reflecting an era when every commodity bound for Europe from the near and far East, Brazil and north America bore a "via Trieste" lading bill.

Lloyds Triestino

On the car journey to Trieste I read Jan Morris's Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, about her love for the city she (then he) had first visited as a young soldier at the end of the second world war. 

'Nowhere' because of its nationless, diasporic, unplaceable character, this cosmopolitan city claimed by Austrians, Germans, Italians and Slavs, the junction for European Jews headed to Palestine and Europe's intersection with the rest of the world. 

Maybe this quality of nowhereness is what has attracted expats and exiles here for centuries.  

James Joyce lived here for many years, as an impoverished English teacher at the Berlitz school.

Here on the Canal Grande di Trieste he's immortalised, in the city he called Europiccola, where his first child was born and he wrote prolifically, finishing The Dubliners and starting on Ulysses

I liked the unobtrusive, almost incidental, way he's placed, having a casual stroll across the bridge.

In Trieste Joyce taught English to Italo Svevo, then an aspiring writer who Joyce helped get translated and published in France, thus making his name. Svevo (born Ettore Schmitz), who Joyce used as the inspiration for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, is also captured wandering the city, in a little piazza not too far from the Canal Grande, on his way to the public library.

This is clearly a city that celebrates its literary figures. Umberto Saba, poet and novelist, is caught walking out of his bookshop where he made a living from 1919 selling old and rare books

The Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba

For all its nowhereness and geographical oddity - only just inside Italy, at its northeastern edge, almost completely surrounded by Slovenia on one side and the Adriatic on the other (according to Jan Morris, in a 1999 survey 70 percent of Italians did not know it was in Italy at all!) - after driving through Germany, Austria and Slovenia, I felt instantly, getting out of the car on the sea-facing piazza, that I was in Italy.

Something to do with Vespas in the sunshine  

and Verdi

and a particular way of relaxed and animated people enjoying life in cafes. 

At Caffè Specchi on the Piazza Unità d'Italia we watched functionaries from local government and insurance companies on their unhurried lunch breaks, casually and beautifully suited

and had fabulously good, simple food, bread and wine.

Trieste is also quite literally Europe's home of coffee - another legacy of its commercial sea-trading past when Trieste received coffee beans from all over the world and supplied the Austro-Hungarian empire, including Vienna's coffee houses.

It's home in particular to Illy coffee. I stocked up on beans in their fab flagship store and admired their Artist Collection of espresso cups.  

Illy espresso is served in every cafe (probably helped by the fact that Signor Ricardo Illy, head of the coffee dynasty and MP, was mayor of Trieste for some years!)

The piazza and Adriatic view at sunset made me nostalgic to leave, planning a return ...

Trieste, Italy, July 2016