I took the train to Trieste – here’s my guide

Next stop in our series marking the rail pass’s 50th birthday is the Italian city of Trieste, where literary past meets cosmopolitan present – and everyone goes to the seaside

Grandiose buildings, coffeehouse culture and a central square big enough to parade a small army in … there’s a reason this city at the end of the Adriatic is called “little Vienna by the sea”. Since the 14th century, when it asked the House of Habsburg for protection from the covetous reach of Venice, Trieste has spent more time as an Austrian city than as an Italian one. The imposing facades were built during its heyday as a major seaport of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and even today the mittel-Europeans who come here on holiday can’t help but feel at home.

There’s little shipping trade left – on the waterfront beyond that huge square, Piazza Unità d’Italia, cruise ships look down benignly on the swaying masts of tiny pleasure yachts – but what remains reveals another Austrian legacy. For 300 years, Trieste has been where the bulk of Italy’s green (unroasted) coffee beans arrive, and it’s rumoured that Triestini drink twice as much of the brew as their countrymen. They certainly like to linger over it, in contrast to the rest of the country’s standup espresso habit. All day long you’ll see people chatting over a capo in b (a mini cappuccino in a glass) in the central Borgo Teresiano area, named after the empress under whose reign many of its now-pedestrianised streets and squares were built.