Trieste on a sunny day

The City has been largely spruced up and many notable buildings including all the great buildings along the sea shore and the Citadel and Catherdral above the city have been extensively renovated, lots of good restaurants, there is a feeling of prosperity despite the financial crisis.

We walked for about 5 hours throughout this beautiful city and have been impressed with its architecture and how nice people are.

We stumbled upon 2 monuments to the Hapsburg, Austria controlled this region for a long time often as a rival of the Republic of Venice who also controlled the area in the middle ages. But the monuments I speak of is of a much later period around 1850 when Franz Josef was Emperor of Austria with his wife Elizabeth known as Sissi. She has her monument in front of the Railway Station and the other is to Maximillian of Hapsburg on Piazza Venezia facing the sea. He was the brother of Franz Josef and he was the Governor of Lombardy and the Veneto which included the province of Istria where Trieste is located. He is remembered kindly by the people of the region because he was a liberal and progressive thinker compared to his brother the Emperor in Vienna who was your old arch conservative type. He also favored economic development and built the Palace of Miramar which brought a lot of people to Trieste and made the name of the region. Trieste became an important sea port and naval base for Austria. Captain Von Trapp (yes him again) served in the Austrian navy and was stationed here.
Tragedy struck Maximillian and his wife when a Mexican delegation under French political influence came to see him and asked him to become Emperor of Mexico. He was told that a referendum had been arranged and that the people of Mexico had chosen him by a huge majority. France promised military help and the Pope gave is blessing. Maximillian could out do his brother by becoming Emperor in his own right in what was thought to be a rich country. When he arrived in Mexico in 1865, he quickly saw that no referendum had taken place, the country was in a state of civil war and anarchy. The French troops he had been promised never materialized, in other words in was on his own with a price on his head. His wife returned to Europe, first to Paris to see Napoleon III to ask for help and troops to support her husband by this time Napoleon III had his own problems with Bismarck and the growing new state of Germany. Napoleon was to loose his throne just a few years later in 1870 at the battle of Sedan and go to England as a guest of Queen Victoria for the rest of his life. Carlotta then ran to Rome asking the Pope to please do something as her husband’s position in Mexico was unbearable. The Pope had a rebellion on his hands with Garibaldi and the Italians fighting for their own freedom from Papal rule. In 1867, Maximillian was arrested in Queretaro near Mexico city and shot by a road side. Carlotta went mad and spent the rest of her life locked up in the Palace of Bouchout near Brussels on her father Leopold I of Belgium orders. As for Franz Josef well he was happy to loose a liberal meddling brother, though his troubles in Italy were not over having to fight Italian rebellion against Austrian rule in the North.