Trieste — Trieste

Trieste's cafés and the bora

Trieste is famous for two things every visitor meets on the first day: the bora and the coffee. The bora is a cold, dry, gusting wind from the northeast that can blow at well over a hundred kilometers an hour; the city has ropes and handrails along some steep streets for the worst days, and locals measure winters by it. Coffee came to Trieste as the Austrian empire's great port, and the city is still one of Europe's main coffee-trading centers. It also has its own coffee vocabulary, which visitors learn fast: in the local usage an espresso is a «nero», an espresso with a little milk is a «capo» (from cappuccino), and «capo in b» is the same thing served in a small glass — in bicchiere. Order a cappuccino and you may get something different from what you expect elsewhere in Italy. These are local words, quoted here in « » the way this course quotes dialect: worth knowing, not standard Italian. The historic literary cafés are part of the city's identity. The Caffè San Marco really did open in 1914, just months before the First World War; it was frequented by writers and intellectuals and still functions as café, bookshop and meeting place, with chess players among the regulars. The waitress's refusal to name the poet is a good Triestine joke: many cafés claim the same famous customers, and everyone tells the story differently.