Trieste

A flight to Venice offers the opportunity for visits to Aquileia and the Thurn und Taxis Castle of Duino.

The following day, a short walk takes us to the Cathedral of San Giusto and the Lapidarium where we find the tomb of Winckelmann. The influential graecophile was murdered in the city.

Subsequent visits to the Villa Sartorio and Palazzo Revoltella reveal echoes of Biedermeier Vienna. Baron Revoltella, who donated his home to the city, was involved in the building of the Suez Canal. He was also concerned with the Castle of Miramare, built for the Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1856 before he had to leave for Mexico, as the country’s ill-fated emperor.

There were four railway lines out of Trieste conveying goods of four continents in and out of Europe. One of these was to Udine and the other to Ljubljana. We will visit both cities. In Udine the Tiepolos in the Archbishop’s Palace and the Oratorio della Purita are superb. We visit the mausoleum of Charles X of France in Gorizia, followed by drinks in a nearby palazzo, not open to the public.

Ljubljana is the showpiece for the architecture of the great Joze Plecnik – a contemporary of Lutyens but more exciting. In the 1930s he was responsible for laying out the centre of the Slovene capital, giving an air of intimate but splendid theatricality. We visit his only villa, still in private hands.

On our last day we follow again the Austro-Hungarian thread through the great Italian port of Trieste, visiting the family apartment of the Morpurgo family and we end in the famous coffee house of Caffé San Marco, where Jan Morris feels she is ‘among just the same customers, mutatis mutandis as would have been there a century ago…’

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