Geography

Here I will talk about the city I live, hoping that some of you come and pay me a visit. Trieste is a beautiful city (~250 thousand inhabitants) in the north-east of Italy, near the border with Slovenia and easily reachable from Venice by train or car. There is an airport too, in a small village nearby called Ronchi dei Legionari.

Its most flourishing period was during last century, when Trieste was the most important harbour of Austrian empire. Many buildings remind that happy age, and in particular Miramar Castle, which was the residence of Franz Joseph's brother, the unfortunate Archduke Maximillian.

A kind of melancholy for this Austrian period is still present in the inhabitants: a sort of remembering of a past golden age. The cause of it partly due to trade and wealth decrease after World War I, when Italy annexed the city.

Nowadays the most important activities of Trieste are connected with science: a part from the university and the astronomical observatory, there are an important centre of theoretical physics, the international school of superior advanced studies. The synchrotron machine and an area of important research in advanced materials and space optics.

Trieste, nonetheless, is not only a city of science: there are three theatres featuring prose and music, and an opera house; seven cinemas, some museums, two castles (the above mentioned Miramar, and the medieval San Giusto's), ruins of a Roman theatre, and a wonderful sea.

The city is not a proper seaside resort, because of its geographical collocation: between the sea and a peculiar rocky plateau called Karst. The beach so is not a sandy one but a small amount of tiny rocks just between the rock-face and the sea, which is clean, transparent and not very deep (the maximum deepness in our gulf is of 20 Mt.). A sandy beach is not very far: maybe half an hour west there is Grado.

During summertime there are a lot of festivals both in town and nearby, where you can eat, drink wine and dance, if you please. There are also places in the near surroundings where you can practise in mountain-climbing, and temperature is not so hot even in the warmest months.

In winter a peculiar wind, called "bora", blows in Trieste, carrying cold weather from central Europe, but also keeping days sunny, and when I have said peculiar I meant wind gusts of more than 100 km/h.

I have included here some pictures of Trieste and a couple of sunset panoramas taken by me. Hoping to have aroused your

interest, I end this "tourist" section urging you to contact me before you spend some days in Trieste, particularly if "you" are cute representatives of opposite sex (I'm joking, ain't I ?).

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