Ports of Greece and Rome: Recipe for a good city

220,000 people, buildings of four to six storeys, a mix of architectural styles well-blended, proximity to sea and mountains, and a town council that cares how the place looks. Trieste has all these things. We have no basis for knowing how the weighting applies to each element. Certainly however it is instructive that with, in our terms, a small population, there is plenty of life, a university, a huge hospital, and a good public transport system. Our nearest equivalent might be Wollongong. Trieste wins by quite a few lengths.

Chris asked about good food/restaurants and whether we had found some, her experience being that this was a bit hard to find. We found great delis, and from them ate picnics on our balcony on a couple of nights. There were huge numbers of cafes, but relatively few ristorantes/trattorias. We had two good Italian meals and one shocker Indian, but on the latter, what might we have expected really? We did have to walk about a fair bit to find the two Italian meals, so I guess finding good food wasn’t that easy.

We went to the Revolterra Museum of Modern Art (19^th century to now) and to a couple of other museums of prehistory and local history, and we took the tram/funicular up to the top of the Karst Plateau from where we had magnificent views of Trieste but also across to the Istrian peninsula in one direction and into the mountains of Slovenia in the other. And we poked around the antique shops of what used to be the Jewish ghetto. But the biggest pleasure was just walking about the streets, coming across odd bits of Roman stuff and seeing beautiful palazzo after beautiful palazzo. We covered a lot of the city over the several days and no where did the lovely buildings seem to run out. There were patches that were less grand or well off but on the whole the commercial buildings were fantastic. Here are some examples.