Trieste, Italy

As I was saying to Niki: The problem with most interesting natural phenomena is that they kill you!’ We are in the midst of a quite strong Bora, which is the result of the extremely cold temperatures (which resulted in yesterday’s big dumping of snow) over the interior (Justinian Alps, to be precise) and the lower Adriatic. Wind speeds last night had gusts well over 80km/h – not nearly close to the record of over 300km/h recorded down the road a few years ago, but still enough to keep the van rocking and rolling through the night. Forecast is for worse to come …

Caught a bus into the centre of town this morning – well done Niki – and took a walkalong the piers and promenade in front of the Square of Italian Unification. It was freezing with very strong gusts of wind blowing us sideways – sort of reminiscent of Cape Town! In Trieste they too string ropes and chain to provide handholds for pedestrians. Given the low temps and strong winds we can be forgiven for cutting our visit short and heading back to the van. The be fair, perhaps not the most interesting old town we’ve walked through. Two big pluses were the excellent (and very cheap) coffee, and the excellent (and very cheap) bus service – Italy continues to nail both of these. Some other areas – driving – are still to be worked on.

So we are settling back in the van – some sun occasionally streams in – and catching up with reading and perhaps a TV series. Plan is to get to Aquileia and see the ruins tomorrow before camping outside Venice tomorrow night and spending some time in the city. Italy is proving to be difficult to do free camping as we have elsewhere in Europe, and campsites are relatively expensive and not too well appointed – oh, and diesel is super expensive, almost €1.60 a litre compared to the €1.19 we paid in Austria – no sign of yellow vests, though…

And, continuing previous posts on epic restoration failures, let’s take a closer look at this disaster in the city’s main square. To be fair, almost all the figures in this work have been botched to a similar degree … You might want to click here to see some of the classic fails.