Trieste

Trieste spent six hundred years being Austrian and has never quite decided to stop. It is Italy's least Italian city, and that is the entire point. It sits at the very top of the Adriatic, on the last strip of Italy before Slovenia, a Habsburg seaport that Maria Theresa built into the fourth city of an empire, behind only Vienna, Budapest and Prague. The squares are enormous and open straight onto the water. The old buffets will pour you a glass at eleven in the morning and hand you a platter of cold cuts, and nobody finds it strange that the menu runs to goulash and strudel. James Joyce drank at the Caffè San Marco. It is still open, and it still looks the part.