Trieste is a strange place.

Trieste is a strange place. Not many people even know where it is. Over the years it has been a part of Rome, Venice, Austria, France, Germany and Yugoslavia. This information makes it hard to pinpoint on a map. At the moment it is in northeast Italy, although a surprising 1999 survey claimed that less than 30% of Italians were aware of this. I was there for a few days last month.

Being of uncertain parentage Trieste is not a typical Italian city. It's about the size of Cork and divided up into a few overlapping quarters. It's kinda like Split meets Milan meets Vienna. There is a restored Roman amphitheatre surrounded by a supermarket and towering office blocks. The commercial streets leading down to the sea are set in a rigid Central European grid, making it easy to find your way around, but not over exciting to stroll.

The old town is full of windy tangled lanes scattered with wild cats and old churches leading up the hill to the crumbling Castello on the top. There is a shabby selection of old cannons and spears on display, but also a wonderful view of the red tile roofs, dotty white clouds and blue crystal bay from the ramparts. Next door is the Cattedrale di San Giusto, the floor of which used to be a Roman Temple. Everything in Trieste seems patched together, but not in a bad way. It's not especially pretty, but it has character.

The centre of the Habsburg town is the Piazza Unita D'Italia. Three sides of this huge square are big chunky yet ornate buildings with grey stone carved figures holding up the doors and windows. The other side is wide open to the deep blue sea. There is also a quaint canal and a pier spearing out into the Adriatic. It is clean and quiet and you can sit out in the sun and sip beer and enjoy the view. The early evening sun sparkled on the water like diamonds.

Maybe the last Irish writer to visit Trieste was James Joyce. He arrived in 1904, after eloping with Nora Barnacle, and stayed for over ten years. Trieste, ah Trieste ate I my liver, he wrote in Finnegans Wake. I'm not really sure what he meant by this. Anyway, his Trieste seems to have been much more exciting than mine, a bustling port city with Italians, Germans, Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Jews etc clanging together on its noisy streets.

By day Joyce taught English, at nights he enjoyed the cutting edge theatre, opera, wine and brothels which the cosmopolitan city served up. Joyce scholar John McCourt maintains that the mix of high culture and ribald high living greatly influenced Joyce's writing. He delighted in Trieste's not unDublinlike combination of religion and lust. The local dialect Triestino, which mixes Italian, German, Slovenian, English, Turkish and Greek must have been music to his ears. Here he wrote Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the opening chapters of Ulysses.

Today's Trieste is more monocultural. Once it joined Italy after WWI lots of Slavs and Germans left, to be replaced with Southern Italians. Pizza and pasta dominate the menus. The port and brothels have been cleared out of sight. The old town has been cleaned and repackaged with lots of faux-poky shops selling old furniture and trendy trinkets.

Trieste is very much a café society. There are surprisingly few restaurants, and no superpubs. The best cafes are classy and atmospheric. The Caffe San Niccolo on Via c Battisti dates from the 1910s and attracts writers and students with its red table cloths, carved wooden chairs and impressionistic black and white photos of beautiful women. The Caffe degli Specchi on Piazza Unita D'Italia is older and more establishment with gilded mirrors and highly attentive waiters. The coffee everywhere is excellent and inexpensive.

Possibly Trieste's signatory feature is the Castel Miramare, a gleaming white turreted square box hanging on a rocky crag over the Adriatic. Inside it is all creaky wooden floors, red drapes and huge oil paintings ranging from seascapes to portraits of the King of Brazil. It was built for Maximillian, brother of Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef in 1860s, but he never got to live there. He was decreed King of Mexico by the Great European Powers, but unfortunately the Mexicans weren't over keen on the idea and ended his reign by firing squad. The castle is beautiful, strange, melancholy, and faintly futile, so it fits in well with the rest of the city.

Party central Trieste isn't. Shrieking British hen parties and geriatric Japanese tourist groups were agreeably absent. You are unlikely to bump into any old friends from school. The only internet café I could find closes Sundays and Mondays. That's not to say the place is dead, just sleepy. Nobody seems in too much of a rush. There are yawning stray cats in every nook of the old city. Food and wine and espressos are quality and cheap. Even in late March it was sunny T-shirt weather. It is a decent place to spend a quiet weekend, lazing around thinking and chatting. Like Joyce's writing, it doesn't make much obvious sense, but seems just right. Three and a half stars.

Information:

Ryanair fly daily from Stansted - city centre approx 45 mins on local bus - my 4 flights, booked six weeks in advance cost 105 euro in total
I stayed at the Hotel Alabarda in the city centre - nice, clean, standard, unexciting hotel [singles xeuro; doubles ]; there is also a HI hostel outside the city near Miramare
Decent meal with wine in nice restaurant - approx 15 euro
To read while you're there: 'James Joyce in Trieste' by John McCourt and 'Trieste: the meaning of nowhere' by Jan Morris, ? by Italo Svevo