Rome, Florence, Venice — they’re all lovely. But Trieste is downright intoxicating, and in so many ways.

When I see the man behind the bar, I see Trieste.

He’s wiry, with dark Mitteleuropean features and an air of quiet intensity. “What have you got by Rencel?” I ask.

I’m asking about an obscure Slovenian winemaker named Josko Rencel, and I’ve put the question to him in impeccable Italian. The proprietor could not be less impressed. He whirls toward the bank of 500 or so bottles stationed behind him, roots through a box below the bottom shelf, pulls out three bottles by Rencel — a Sauvignon, a Malvasia, and a late-harvest red made with refosco grapes — and sets them in front of me. Checkmate.

“Is it possible to have one of them by the glass?” I ask timidly.

The proprietor could crush my spirit here and now. Instead, he gives a casual wave of the hand, saying, “Tutto è possibile.” Everything is possible. He then uncorks the Sauvignon.

It’s midafternoon. A couple of elegant middle- aged women and an octogenarian man sit on the bar stools behind me. The ladies are drinking Prosecco; the gentleman is imbibing an espresso laced with grappa while he rattles the pages of Il Manifesto. Each of them has a leashed dog. The proprietor slides me a small plate of crostini with locally produced Montasio cheese to go with the wine. He doesn’t know my name, nor I his, though he and I have been joined in this ritual at Gran Malabar once or twice a year for a decade now. Somehow, that has always seemed to me to be a fitting arrangement in Trieste, where hospitality is never of the unctuous kind. You slide easily into an Italian tableau and then slide back out, confident that this is neither some practiced fantasyland nor a frail ecosystem but instead the stuff of natural human exchange — which is the miracle of Trieste, a city that has been bludgeoned with frightful regularity and yet remains like my man behind the bar: a figure of cool, unruffled decency.

My Trieste stories are all this way, pleasurable and unself-consciously authentic. I bought my hip (if I do say so myself ) Italian eyeglasses from an optician here a few years back. Another time, two days after covering the 2004 presidential election, I found myself in an unprepossessing but excellent seafood restaurant nearby called Slauko, sharing a feast of Adriatic bounty with three others while gazing out at the vast, politically indifferent gulf from whence it all came. On one Saturday afternoon, I turned a corner onto Via del Ponte and thereby stumbled upon the city’s monthly antique market: The rows of dusty books and lustrous picture frames transformed the old quarter into a centuries-old memory of itself. And one evening, I found myself invited to a local enoteca’s anniversary party, where I became enamored of a waitress, and she apparently of me — though I had to excuse myself to grab what I promised her would be a quick dinner at the great Al Bagatto. Alas, the restaurant’s wine list was a siren song, its array of olive oils and exotic local shellfish too demanding a lover … with the inevitable result that when I finally returned to the enoteca, though the party was still well under way, the waitress had settled into the arms of a less gluttonous suitor.

Still, most of my Trieste experiences are unpurposeful — and happily so, I should hasten to add, since the word triste means “sad.” And though the city’s name doesn’t derive from that word, there are those out there who would give you the impression that Trieste is a real downer of a place. An Italian friend of mine compares Trieste to a princess who’s forever awaiting her errant prince. Another friend, the Italophilic author Fred Plotkin, has written of the city’s distinct weltschmerz, or world-weariness. The great travel writer Jan Morris, an unabashed fan of the city, nonetheless titled her paean to it Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. I can only conclude that these authors are part of a campaign instigated to discourage Trieste’s overpopulation, much the way Seattle residents happily concur that, oh, yes, it’s far too rainy to live there — try Portland!

No one who has ever laid eyes on Trieste disputes its beauty. Its combination of theatrical seaside setting, stately architecture, and beguiling cross-cultural ambience has no peer in Italy. But because Trieste is east of Venice (a two-hour drive or train ride away), most Americans have never heard of it, or of the gorgeous region of which Trieste is capital, Friuli Venezia Giulia. For that matter, many Friulians don’t connect to their capital, since Trieste fell into Italian hands only at the conclusion of World War I.
Still, just as 50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong, there’s something to be said for a city that the Romans, Huns, Byzantines, Lombards, Goths, Cossacks, Venetians, Austrians, Nazis, Yugoslavs, and Italians each took the trouble to invade. The allure is Trieste’s seaport, wedged invitingly into the crossroads of Western and Eastern Europe. Because of this geographical happenstance, blood has washed through Trieste for centuries — most recently (as monuments and street names throughout town attest), as a result of the grueling battles on the Carso plateau above the city during the First World War and of the lynchings of Nazi resisters during World War II.