The windiest (the cold, fierce bora from the Slovenian Alps) and the least Italianate (it was Austria’s chief port until 1918) of Italian cities, Trieste ascends San Giusto hill from broad quays, dignified palazzi, a 2ndC Roman theatre, the Teatro Verdi and a huge museum of history and art (emblem of the city – see www.museostoriaeartetrieste.it), meandering into a maze of wine-shops and cheap restaurants and a ramshackle diversity of local colour. Children and adults delight in the venerable Aquarium on the front.

Italo Svevo the novelist and his near-contemporary James Joyce lived here – the latter a poverty-stricken exile from Dublin, 1904-06.

Five km west on a promontory is the white dream-castle of Miramare, former residence of the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian, later Emperor of Mexico (www.castello-miramare.it). There is son et lumiére between June and September. Hereabouts young Henrik Ibsen, emerging from an overnight train journey through the Alps, was overcome by the ‘wonderful soft brightness of the South’ – start of a lifelong love affair with Italy which, strangely, inspired none of his plays.