Trieste

I've come to Trieste for the perfectly good reason that I've never been here before.  I was a little shocked to find a huge, huge cruise ship - like the kind that used to sail down the Giudecca like skyscrapers on their sides - moored quite literally in front of my window: I was delighted that it sailed off into the sunset.  And its smaller companion has departed, too, leaving the custom house correctly proportioned.

Trieste is absolutely unlike anywhere I've ever been.  I'd expected more Venetian influence - but no: it's as though a chunk of central Vienna decided to go on a seaside vacation.  I've been reading Jan Morris's book on the place this evening - she manages to be outstanding in her historical evocation and her capacity to call up the belatedness of the city, as ever in her writing (and yes, I know that she has a strong capacity to be nostalgic about what she sees as the more benign aspects of empires, too - but all the same, she knows how to call up place).  So I've been getting a strong sense of its trading history, its cosmopolitan qualities in the late eighteenth, the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

This is its own Grand Canal - very short.  Those little white tents - ah, yes, a cheese festival... I don't know the name, but I bought some wonderful dark orange goat cheese...

and the Opera House.

The main, huge piazza is almost unphotographable, because of its shiny breadth, but here's the top of an old insurance company building - Trieste protecting the interests of the (Western) world.

And the Grand Canal, from the other end.

I had better draw a veil over my Mistake of the Day - I went through a door marked "scale" - stairs - quite near my room, thinking this would be a way down that would give me some extra exercise, and very swiftly found myself locked out on the fire escape.  "Scala di sicurezza" is the phrase you need when you're making a call to the front desk for someone to come and let you in again.  You're welcome.

Oh, and a parting glance at Venice from my vaporetto stop this morning.