I stepped off at Molo Bersaglieri at seven in the morning, my shoes hitting the damp concrete of the pier while the scent of salt and diesel hung in the cool Adriatic air. The sun had barely cleared the Karst plateau behind the city, and Piazza Unità d'Italia — the largest square opening directly onto the sea in all of Europe — lay before me like an invitation I had waited years to accept. My hands were cold in the early breeze, but my heart was already warm with the anticipation of what this Habsburg jewel had kept hidden from me for so long.

The morning light was turning the city hall facade gold as I crossed the piazza alone. Three sides are lined with grand Habsburg buildings, their coffee houses tucked beneath elegant colonnades. Emperor Charles VI declared Trieste a free port in the early 1700s, and trade bloomed — merchants from across Europe settled here, built these palaces, filled them with books and music and the scent of roasting coffee beans brought from distant lands. I could smell that same aroma drifting from a café doorway, rich and dark and ancient, and for a moment I understood why writers like James Joyce chose to live here rather than anywhere else in the world.

I found Caffè San Marco on Via Cesare Battisti, where Joyce and Italo Svevo once scratched their novels into being. The waiters still wear bow ties. My cappuccino cost €1.30, and it was perfect — velvety foam over dark espresso that tasted like it had been roasted with care and served with pride. The coffee house culture here is pure Habsburg soul — Austrian elegance mixed with a warmth that felt distinctly Slavic, goulash sitting beside Italian risotto on the menu, newspapers in four languages scattered across marble tables. I ordered a strudel for €3.50 and felt the quiet grace of a thousand past conversations swirling in the steam that rose from my cup.

But Miramare Castle — twenty minutes north by bus at a cost of €1.35 each way — that is where the real heartbreak lives. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian designed it with architect Carl Junker in 1856, a white jewel on a rocky promontory overlooking the Adriatic. It was finished in 1860, every room filled with his and Charlotte's dreams: botanical gardens with plants gathered from their travels, a throne room fit for the royalty they believed they would become, balconies where they watched the sunset and imagined a future as bright as the sea. They lived there only briefly before Napoleon III convinced Maximilian to accept the doomed crown of Mexico. The castle admission fee is €10, though the park is free and worth every minute of walking through its peaceful shade.