Romans, Habsburgs and Mussolini Self Guided Tour of Trieste

Stand on the pier whose namesake destroyer was Japanese by design and Scottish by birth.

Trace the bilingual plaque marking the spot where Mussolini chose Italy's largest seaside square for his worst speech.

Look up at the spirit of Trieste, vanished for thirty-two years to make room for a dictator's stage.

Step inside the café whose engraved mirrors once chronicled the city, before invading armies looted them.

Watch two black metal figures swing their hammers above the square at the top of every hour.

Pass beneath a Roman gate whose name comes from a king who was never here.

Find the seam where two early Christian churches were fused into one cathedral in the fourteenth century.

Climb the Habsburg fortress that never fought a war, but jailed an alchemist with a mercury cure.

Walk a hillside that was once a Jewish cemetery, now a memorial of rough Karst stones.

Count the steps locals once accused of being built for a race of giants.

Spot a two-thousand-year-old theatre that an entire neighbourhood was built on top of and forgotten.

Discover the bronze emperor a Fascist regime took down, hid in storage, and quietly returned.

Browse the second-hand shop a poet bought the year the First World War ended.

Encounter the red, white and green Italian tricolour, accidentally assembled by three Habsburg-era bridges.

Cross the canal Maria Theresa cut through a salt marsh to make Trieste the empire's main port.

See the blue and gold Serbian church whose congregation politely split from the Greeks after twenty-six years.

Look for bullet marks inside a church where Allied police once opened fire on protesters.

Examine two bronze cherubs delivering letters above the side doors of the grandest post office you will see.