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In a quiet corner of Italy… Trieste

The title comes from an article published in April 2011 by The New York Times. Adam Begley, the author of the article, described Trieste as “a medium-size seaport” teetering on the edge of what it is usually recognized as Italy. With its melting-pot population, “a street plan that ranges from serenely rational to bewilderingly crooked and steep, and a forbidding limestone plateau crowding it down to the waterfront” (Begley), Trieste is compared to a modernist novel — complex, layered, ambiguous.

Trieste is, indeed, a paradoxical city. Close to the centre of Europe yet connected to all the Mediterranean countries by sea, Trieste is a true crossroads of international trade and culture.

On the extreme North-Eastern border of the Italian peninsula, the city of Trieste was for almost two centuries the most important port of the multinational Habsburg Empire. As a free port (1719 – 1918), the city was able to attract a range of people from different places and backgrounds. In no other city but Trieste can one be overcome by a pleasurable sensation of wonder; it is very difficult in fact to identify a unique style of faces, languages and characters. To find out just how magic this place really is, one can observe the variety of architectural elements distributed around the city, the very simple or very luxurious steeples, domes and rose windows.

In Trieste, an Italian cultural identity has long cohabited with Germanic, but also Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian culture. The city was also home to Greek, Armenian, Turkish, Albanian, Hungarian and Jewish communities and cultures. Moreover, Trieste hosted many French, Spanish, and British citizens such as, among the most famous, Stendhal, Joyce or Richard Burton.

In Trieste, Svevo wrote Zeno’s Conscience, his best-known novel, which was published in 1923. His statue stands at the edge of the Medieval old town, in a piazza that is filled most weekends with antique dealers. Joyce, who lived in Trieste for close to a decade and wrote most of Dubliners and all of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there, also gets a statue, on a narrow bridge crossing the city’s Grand Canal. Sir Richard Francis Burton and Jan Morris are among other noted writers who have felt the city’s pull.

Trieste has seen the development of important international and national research institutes for research, technology transfer and the dissemination of science in Trieste, bringing to the city a concentration of research workers among the highest in the world. EuroScience and the ESOF Supervisory Board have recently announced that the EuroScience Open Forum 2020 will be hosted from 4 to 10 July 2020 in Trieste. ESOF (EuroScience Open Forum) is the largest interdisciplinary science meeting in Europe. As a Central European city, Trieste will work to make ESOF 2020 an example of strengthening links with Central and Eastern European scientists, businesses, politicians and citizen.

About the University of Trieste

Founded in 1924, the University of Trieste is a medium-sized university with a student population of approximately 16,000. It offers a wide range of degree programmes at bachelor, master and doctoral level, as well as short vocational masters, advanced masters and specialisation programmes, most of which are in the medical area. Some degree programmes are taught in English.

The university currently has 10 departments: Economic, Business, Mathematical and Statistical Sciences; Engineering and Architecture; Humanities; Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies; Mathematics and Geosciences; Medicine, Surgery and Health Sciences; Life Sciences; Pharmaceutical and Chemical Sciences; Physics; Political and Social Sciences.

The university participates in many research projects at national and international level. It is also involved in various student and staff exchange programmes with universities in the EU and collaborates with several universities from Eastern Europe and other non-EU countries.

We are looking forward to meeting you in Trieste!