An espresso-fueled tour of Trieste, Italy's longstanding coffee capital

“So, what is it?” Moreno Faina wafts the perfume towards me. I inhale. Tropical fruit is my first guess, and I’m wrong. Then, suddenly, my nose knows — it’s jasmine. I’m with the director of Illy’s Università del Caffè in Trieste, and we’re sniffing out the 16 notes that comprise the Italian coffee’s signature scent. “We worked with ‘The Nose’ — Venetian master perfumer Lorenzo Dante Ferro — to identify them,” says Moreno, a tall, fast-talking Roman whose love of coffee brought him here to Italy’s far northeastern corner three decades ago.

Founded in Trieste in 1933, all things Illy are researched, roasted, packed and distributed to 140 countries across the world solely from this plant by the city’s cargo port. And this is also where you’ll find the company’s University of Coffee, offering a programme of classes, tastings and workshops teaching industry professionals and keen consumers like me all about the caffeinated bean, also broadcast to its worldwide 27-branch Unicaffe network.

In the cafe, I sip a silky cold brew under a ceiling-strung gallery of limited-edition coffee cups. An annual project engages a different artist to decorate Illy’s signature espresso cup — the likes of Judy Chicago, Jeff Koons and Yoko Ono have all contributed. Nearby, walls are lined with vintage coffee machines, tins and posters, including the company’s original advert commissioned by founder, Ernesto Illy. Featuring an art deco-style silhouette of a woman sipping an espresso, it feels quintessentially Italian. Ernesto Illy, however, was a Hungarian from Vienna. And in many ways, his is the story of Trieste, a Roman-founded Italian city shaped by its long history in the Habsburg Empire, from 1382 to 1918.

“This whole area was designed in the 18th century by Maria Theresa, a Habsburg empress who never visited Trieste,” says my guide Joorinde Steinhorst when I meet her later in the city’s central Borgo Teresiano district. Named after its absentee Austro-Hungarian designer, the handsome quarter of colourful mansions in florid, Vienna secession art nouveau style recalls streets in the Austrian capital, Prague or Budapest.

Beyond the Borgo, we explore neighbourhoods lined with brutalist bank buildings, sitting cheek-by-jowl with the ruins of Roman city walls. Below a 33 BCE Roman gate, which is carved with a coiled cluster of pomegranates, Joorinde points out medieval houses of the former Jewish ghetto. And all this is stacked up against karst mountains rising steeply off the coast to form a natural border with Slovenia, which is minutes away by car.

A puzzle of a place, Trieste is perhaps best seen from above. At Barakin, a superlative clifftop coffee kiosk south of the Borgo, we sit at one of its scattering of tree-shaded tables overlooking city and sea below. A much-loved example of Trieste’s ubiquitous cafe kiosks, Barakin serves coffee made by Antica Tostatura Triestina, one of the city’s boutique roasteries, whose beans are unique for being wood-fired. Not only does Trieste take coffee making seriously, it has a distinct lexicon for ordering the stuff. Joorinde helps me out.

“If you want espresso, say ‘nero’, and it’s ‘caffe latte’ for a cappuccino-like drink,” she says, noting that unlike elsewhere in Italy, Trieste doesn’t seem to have quite the same unwritten rule about milky coffee being verboten after mid-morning. “The ‘cappo’ — short for cappuccino – is a small, strong coffee with dense milk foam,” she continues. “And ‘cappo in b’ — b for bicchiere the Italian for glass — is very popular. We drink lots of coffee in glasses here. Some say it’s because Trieste catered to sailors who needed something they could grab and warm their hands on more easily than a dainty cup.”

Italy’s largest port, Trieste still sees a daily influx of ships. Back at sea level, I marvel at its naturally deep harbour dropping 200ft sheer off the shoreline. It’s so deep that towering 7,000-berth cruise ships appear to have pulled up to the pavement, prow to balcony with the grande dame seafront hotel, the Starhotels Collezione Savoia Excelsior Palace. Nearby, I call in at what looks like a landed ocean liner, the Caffè degli Specchi, a belle epoque beauty with gilded mirrors where all coffees are accompanied by a little glass of chocolate as standard — hot in winter, chilled in summer.

Triestini are said to drink twice as much coffee as the average Italian, but there’s only so much caffeine this mere mortal can manage. So later, I toddle off for a soothing sundowner at Caffé San Marco, a sprawling salon with Mittle-European vibes, all nicotine-hue walls, dark wood and shining brass samovar-style espresso machines. I order a house-made vermouth, coffee-flavoured of course, with a twist of orange. Savouring its more-caramel-than-coffee taste, I take a seat in the cafe’s bookshop.

Here, I find works by former cafe denizens: James Joyce, Jan Morris and beloved Italian-Hungarian author Umberto Saba. Once a hotbed of irredentists and intellectuals, Caffé San Marco also did a fine line in forged passports when Italy declared war on Austria in 1915, sold to Italian loyalists in Trieste who wanted to hop across the border to Italy. They could’ve waited. Just three years later, after more than 500 years of Austrian rule, Trieste was once again Italian. But even now, certainly here under the café’s soaring Viennese salon ceilings, that Habsburg heritage lives on.