Roman, Venetian, Austrian, Italian, Slav, poised between East and West, the Balkans and the Mediterranean, Central Europe and the Levant: Trieste, the “Vienna on the Sea”, free port, stateless, multilingual and multi-soul city, built steeply on a slice of the Adriatic Sea at the crossroads of an entire civilization; one of the most fervent cultural salons of the continent between the 19th and 20th centuries, frequented by personalities such as Joyce, Rilke, Svevo, Burton. This itinerary starts with a tour of Trieste’s sumptuous urban layout, an Art Nouveau setting tending to Rococo, which opens like a backdrop to the sea, and its historic cafes, where you can breathe the nobly crepuscular atmosphere of the late Habsburg Empire, in addition to exploring the Collio wine region, on the border with Slovenia, and touches on two other splendid cities in the Italian north-east, Venice and Verona.