Friuli-Venezia Giulia

Trieste in June or October is a city that feels like nowhere else in Italy. The Habsburg architecture tells the story of an Austro-Hungarian port city that only became part of Italy in 1954. The grand Piazza Unità d’Italia opens directly onto the sea. The literary café culture runs deep: Caffè San Marco has barely changed since 1914, Joyce wrote parts of Ulysses nearby, and the city feels more Central European than Mediterranean. The bora wind, which hits in winter and makes people grip iron handrails mounted in the street, is part of the local mythology. Summer is warmer and the Adriatic is calm.

Spend 2 nights in Trieste. Walk the Austro-Hungarian streets, sit for hours in Caffè San Marco with a notebook or newspaper, visit the Cathedral of San Giusto at the top of the hill. Castello di Miramare sits on a dramatic promontory just north of the city — a white castle built by Archduke Maximilian in the 1850s above brilliant blue water. The gardens are wonderful in May; arrive at 8am before the tour groups. Then move into the Collio wine region, which stretches east toward the Slovenian border. It’s a series of rolling hills producing some of Italy’s most elegant white wines. The road from Cormons to Dolegna del Collio runs through vineyard country with very few tourists. Stay in Cormons or in a small wine village for 2 nights and do a tasting at a small producer — not an industrial one. The wines are Friulano (formerly called Tocai), Ribolla Gialla, and Pinot Grigio with genuine minerality that supermarket versions never have.

Cividale del Friuli is a small medieval town in the mountains with extraordinary Longobard heritage — it’s UNESCO listed. The Tempietto Longobardo is one of the most beautiful and least-known early medieval monuments in Italy: a small stone chapel from the 7th or 8th century, inside a larger church, with stucco decoration that feels delicate and sophisticated. Most visitors don’t realise it’s there. Grotta Gigante near Trieste is one of the world’s largest accessible caves; the stalactite formations fill a chamber 100 metres high. The osmizze are traditional farmhouse wine bars in the Carso hills that open for only a few weeks each year — locals know to stop by and drink wine from the barrel, eat simple bread and cheese, and vanish before the season ends. They’re not really tourist destinations; they’re deeply local.

Friulian food is different from the rest of Italy. San Daniele prosciutto is sweeter and more delicate than Prosciutto di Parma; it comes from pigs raised on whey from Montasio cheese production. Frico is a crispy disc of melted cheese and potato, usually potato and fontina, eaten as an appetiser or a side. Cjarsons are a sweet-savoury pasta shape filled with potato, mint, and cinnamon. Jota is a humble soup of beans and sauerkraut that tastes far better than it sounds. The white wines are exceptional: Friulano, Ribolla Gialla, and Picolit (a dessert wine from late-harvest grapes). The vermouth production around Trieste is important; Carpano and Dolin both source heavily from the region.

Trieste is excellent on foot; you can walk the entire city in a long afternoon. A car is essential for the Collio hills and small towns like Cividale. Trains link Trieste and Udine (40 minutes). Cividale has a small train from Udine (20 minutes). The region is compact. Most visitors spend 2 nights in Trieste, 2 nights in the Collio, and 1 night in Cividale, with a day trip to Aquileia’s Roman and early Christian mosaics (UNESCO site, almost completely empty). Venice is 1.5 hours by train if you want to combine the two.

What stays with you is the Habsburg elegance of Trieste and how genuinely foreign it feels from the rest of Italy. The quiet of Cividale and the Tempietto. The wine culture that isn’t obsessed with quantity or fame. The sense that you’ve found a part of Italy that tourists largely haven’t discovered, where the pace is slower and the food is subtle.