'Austrian city' with an Italian address

This old section of Trieste was untouched by the Austrian redevelopers, whose work along the harbor began paying off almost immediately. Free of taxes and duties, revitalized Trieste attracted merchant traders, shipbuilders, and shipping and insurance companies that continued the building boom.

Those who made the most money rewarded themselves with stunning palazzos, several of which are now public museums.

Among the most successful traders was the Baron Pasquale Revoltella, a financier of the Suez Canal. The bachelor baron bequeathed his home to the city, along with oodles of money to support it.

Now the Revoltella Museum, it provides a peek at how wealthy Triestines lived in the 1800s (lavishly), and its airy modern wing is a rich journey through Italian art of the 19th and 20th centuries, including a fascinating collection of moody works by Triestine artists.

This moodiness would have puzzled me if I hadn't read a beautifully written book called "Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere," in which author Jan Morris offers the intriguing notion that Trieste's complicated history has left it a city existing outside strictures of time and national boundaries, forever suspended in sweet melancholia.

Not that Trieste is a depressing city. But it's certainly less gregarious than other cities in Italy.

The one truly somber site in town is the Risiera di San Sabba, a rice-husking plant that became the only Nazi death camp in Italy. Initially it was a way station for prisoners being transported to Dachau or Auschwitz, but an estimated 5,000 people were executed at San Sabba before the Germans blew up the crematorium as they fled in 1945.

Today the site is a museum. Exhibits describe its history with dark eloquence.

In good times and bad, Triestines have enjoyed long walks along the waterfront. Driving into town one Sunday evening, we found ourselves in a traffic jam and speculated on the cause. It was merely the first warm evening in months, and half the town was out ambling.

Trieste's tourism department deftly picks up the walking theme with brochures of thoughtfully designed, self-guided itineraries. Following the Joyce itinerary, based on research by the Laboratorio Joyce in Trieste, one can track the Irish writer's footsteps to 36 checkpoints relevant to his life and work in Trieste (1904-1915 and 1919-1920): places he lived, the Berlitz school where he taught, the cafes he favored. It's a great framework for a city jaunt.

Another itinerary tracks the daily life of Joyce's friend and student, Italo Svevo, one of Italy's most esteemed modern literary figures.

Others focus on museums, architectural styles, places of worship, historical residences, and nature walks above the city, including a favorite path of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. (Sorry, no Freud itinerary. He wasn't in town long enough to leave tracks.)

The most respected denizen of Trieste, in any era, is the Bora, a famously fierce north wind that blows down from the Carso.

Eager to experience the Bora, I snapped to attention every time the slightest breeze riffled leaves during our visit. Was the Bora on its way? Finally, one evening, as we crossed the seacoast road near the science center where our daughter studied, a very strong gust lifted up my long coat, and I almost did a Mary Poppins down the road.

"The Bora!" I shouted triumphantly.

"Uh, no," said my daughter, rolling her eyes. "Not even close." She was living in Trieste on her semester abroad.

The wind that night, she explained, was wimpy, a mere Bora wannabe, nothing like the real thing, which can blow at 75 miles an hour.

The Bora never did put in an appearance during our stay, but that's OK. It seems a perfectly fine excuse to return to Trieste.

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