Italy's coffee capital — Austro-Hungarian grandeur, James Joyce, and the Adriatic
Trieste is the most Central European city in Italy — a Habsburg port on the Adriatic that feels closer to Vienna than to Rome, with monumental neo-classical piazzas, a canal lined with palaces, and the highest concentration of coffee bars per capita of anywhere in Italy. The local coffee culture is its own dialect: in Trieste, a 'caffè' means an espresso, a 'nero' means a macchiato, and a 'capo' is a cappuccino — ordering wrong is a badge of the tourist. James Joyce wrote much of Ulysses and Dubliners here between 1905 and 1915.
Trieste was the Habsburg Empire's main seaport from the 18th century — Maria Theresa declared it a free port in 1719, making it one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, with Italian, Slovenian, Greek, and Jewish communities living side by side. It was finally absorbed by Italy in 1954 after a complex post-WWII dispute with Yugoslavia over the Free Territory of Trieste. The city's literary café culture — Caffè degli Specchi, Caffè San Marco — dates from this Habsburg golden age and is still very much alive.