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Ljubljana and Trieste Side Trip - Page 3
By Tom Kagy | 15 Jul, 2025
During our Ljubljana stay we made a sidetrip to nearby historic port city of Trieste, Italy.
By the time we wended our way down the trail from the castle to the river, it was mid-afternoon and we were ready for lunch. We had hoped to eat at one of about a half dozen restaurants with tables alongside the river but most were occupied or had no umbrellas. A drizzle had begun during our walk down and now intensified into a light rain. We settled on the Fany-Mary restaurant and managed to find a table in front of the restaurant that was sufficiently covered by a big square white umbrellas to let us eat without getting too wet.
The Triple Bridges, which connect Preseren Square to the Castle side of the city, is one of Ljubljana's top attractions.
The chance to enjoy lunch in the sun at a riverside table had been anticipated as one of the day's highlights. So it was with a sense of letdown that we perused the lunch menu. It offered pizza, chicken, burgers, fries and other casual fare. We settled on pizza, fries and salad, and tried to enjoy the rainy-day atmospherics by reminding ourselves that we would have precious few such opportunities back in Southern California.
By the time we finished lunch the rain had stopped and the clouds had parted to reveal some blue and widening streaks of sunshine. We passed students lounging in riverside tables the way we had hoped to do and considered stopping for a cup of coffee or ice cream. But we noticed crowds gathered at Preseren Square and walked over to check it out. It turned out to be some sort of festival that filled the Preseren Square with several hundred people and a dozen or so booths recruiting participation for various causes. Preseren's statue was covered with a couple dozen young people sitting or standing at various places around the pedestal.
A boat tour offers a chance to rest weary legs while enjoying a city-to-suburbs view of Ljubljana.
By late afternoon we were too tired to do more exploring on foot and decided to take a cruise on one of the many boats we had seen plying the Ljubljanica. We went to a dock on the north side of the river, not far from the Triple Bridges to wait for the next tour of Ladjica Ljubljana (Ship Ljubljana). The fare was 15 euros apiece for a 45-minute cruise.
A Ljubljana confectioner's window displays an elegant chocolate shoe.
At the top of the hour we were allowed down the steps to the moored boat, hardly a ship. We waited as three more small groups of passengers boarded before departing eastward. Within fifteen minutes we had passed out of the central entertainment district and into the suburbs where the river escaped the steep rock embankments and expanded into greenery dotted with houses, a riverside restaurant and what appeared to be some sort of private club. It was a pleasant interlude that let us rest our weary legs while enjoying scenes of life along little Ljubljanica.
Trieste's St Anthony's Church is one of the city's central landmarks, positioned squarely at the end of the Grand Canal.
Forty-five minutes later we were back at the dock for a walk back to the hotel to rest and freshen up before heading out for the evening. We began with a leisurely exploration of the alleys set back from the river. Being nearly nine the crowd was beginning to thin. Ultimately we settled on Dvorni Bar, a wine and tapas restaurant and lounge. It was crowded. We snagged a high table with plush backed stools that had just emptied near the front entrance. We ordered cabernet and prosecco to go with our tapas platter, chicken wings and a veggie burger. It was bar food but prepared with a modest degree of culinary flair and quite tasty.
Trieste's Grand Canal is lined with many of the city's most impressive structures.
A word on tipping. In the States we generally tip between 15 and 25%, depending on the quality and enthusiasm of service at full-service restaurants. In most of the restaurants we visited during our Central European road trip waiters didn't expect a tip and didn't present the mobile scanner for a tipping opportunity. An exception was the touristy Old Town section of Prague where waiters did present the scanner's tipping interface, perhaps because they recognized us as tourists and possibly Americans, or because they simply saw a high percentage of tourists. In Ljubljana our waiter at the Julija on our first evening also presented us a tipping opportunity, but nowhere else. At the Dvorni Bar and a couple other restaurants during our trip we had to request to add a tip to show our appreciation for excellent service. Tips are appreciated but the gratitude is muted, perhaps due to European norms of wait staff professionalism.
When we left the Dvorni Bar around ten it was still drawing in more patrons, mostly stylish professionals in their thirties and forties. We, on the other hand, were experiencing the onset of fatigue from nearly ten days on the road, and wanted to wake up relatively early for our side trip to Trieste which is only about a 70-minute drive from Ljubljana.
TRIESTE SIDE TRIP
Trieste is a smallish Italian port city of about 200,000 with a complex history as a pawn of Austrian, French, German and Serbian empires, not to mention the Holy Roman Empire. Trieste didn't even officially become a part of modern Italy until November 4, 1954. Now it's one of Italy's most cosmopolitan cities, with a 13% foreign population, including about a thousand Chinese. Its culture is celebrated for drawing as much from Central European neighbors as from the rest of Italy.
Trieste's history as a prosperous, cosmopolitan merchant city has endowed it with immense architectural and cultural appeal though a good deal of the original structures were damaged or destroyed by 10 US bombing raids during the final months of World War II.
Our plan for a side trip to Trieste was nearly defeated by the delightful walkability of Ljubljana. In the end we went ahead with devoting part of our second full day in Ljubljana to a visit to Trieste. We had to satisfy our curiosity because people seem to subtly brag about visiting Trieste in a way they would never brag about Rome or Milan, so we assumed it must be a special place indeed.
The problem with making a driving trip to any European city is parking. On our road trip we were careful to book only the few hotels with good parking without ridiculous height restrictions. While traveling we limited our parking mostly to our hotels at $50 to $65 per night. The parking hassle kept us from even considering driving in town during our stays, especially since we preferred walking when in Europe. Beyond cost, there simply aren't many places where clueless foreign visitors can easily park. Before even leaving for Trieste, we Google-mapped a parking lot within a mile's walk of the city's center. The only one that qualified was Via del Coroneo Parking on its namesake street at the northern edge of Trieste.
From the lot we walked downhill and southwest along Via del Coroneo toward the sea. A half hour later we found ourselves at the northern side of the port complex which appeared to have been abandoned for years. The quiet, nearly deserted area, we later learned, is part of historic Porto Vecchio which is in the process of being revitalized into a functioning commercial port complex to be called Porto Vivo. That effort may be stalled for now due to a bad patch for the Italian economy. In any case, there was no human activity there, giving us the luxury of a quiet interlude in which to enjoy a long view of the operational sections of the city's ports to the south.
Another half hour of leisurely walking brought us to the Grand Canal, one of the city's main attractions. What makes the Canal a celebrated attraction despite its modest quarter-mile length are the historic piazzas and palaces surrounding it — Palazzo Berlam, Palazzo Gopcevish, Palazzo Carciotti and Palazzo Genel — most of which are now museums. The central view up the canal is of the classic facade of the Church of Sant'Antonio Taurmaturgo fronted by a long grand piazza and fountain.
It was now well past lunchtime for us, so we began taking a keen interest in the half dozen restaurants that line the Grand Canal, including a place called TangRamen via Bellini and a hamburger place called Social Food. We opted for Ristorante Pizzeria Bianco with a front display showing it had won the Pizzeria of the Year award from Gambero Rosso in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
The place was nearly full and we were led up to one open table in the loft extension above the dining area. Naturally the centerpiece of our lunch order was a pizza, along with fried calamari and salad. The pizza was still quite possibly award-worthy, especially the delicious, chewy crust as well as the marinara and the cheeses.
We strolled along the Grand Canal, crossed into the piazza and up to the magnificent St. Anthony church that might have been a structure from Roman Empire days. It wasn't actually built until the early 19th century. We spent some time admiring it and exploring the surrounding area before heading back north on Via Trente Ottobre toward our garage on via del Coroneo. It was about a twenty-minute walk. At the supermarket we paid for a parking pass to be able to exit the lot.
The drive to Slovenia crosses the foothills at the southeastern tip of the Alps and in brief stretches hinted at the magnificent alpine scenery we would encounter when we left Ljubljana the next day for our full-on Alps crossing to Munich via a lunch stop at Salzburg.
We spent our final evening back in Ljubljana enjoying the meandering alleys adjacent to the riverwalk. We wanted to internalize the charmingly human scale of one of the most pleasant cities we had ever visited. To that end we wandered through a portal into what appeared to be a kind of enclave filled with student eateries. Near the end of the dark alley we were captivated by the charming rusticity of Slovenska hiša Ljubljančanka (Slovenian House Ljubljancanka). The walls of the dining area we were taken to were covered with murals, wall hangings and paintings harkening back to old Slovenia.
Wanting to experience a parting taste of Slovenia we ordered hearty traditional, homey-looking dishes of beef, chicken and potatoes, along with salad and beer. It was one of the most satisfying and appropriate-feeling meals of our trip thus far. As travelers we were always eager to immerse ourselves in the native culture of each place — regardless of the fact that many of the natives have moved on to more globalized fare and culture.
The light rain that glistened on the cobblestone of Preseren Square as we headed back to our hotel added just the right touch of regret to the atmospherics. We had loved Ljubljana during our all-too-brief stay and would treasure the visuals of our final evening.
We strolled along the Grand Canal, crossed into the piazza and up to the magnificent church that might have been a structure from Roman Empire days. It wasn't actually built until the early 19th century.
During our stay in Ljubljana we made a side trip to the city of Trieste, Italy.
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