ABSTRACT
Trieste appears frequently as a port city striving to present a cosmopolitan face as a gateway to the Mediterranean Sea, but it remains a city marked by a history of ethnic strife and tension as a harbor on the Adriatic Sea. This chapter explores the ways in which city marketers have sought to evoke the city’s historic role as a Hapsburg trading outlet and specifically to integrate Trieste in the Mediterranean world by evoking the image of the Hapsburg Empress Elisabeth. The attempt to use the image and memory of the Empress Sissi as a cultural conduit to promote Trieste’s role in linking Central Europe to the Mediterranean Sea demonstrates the complicated and ambivalent relationship of a multi-ethnic city caught in the interstices of Mitteleuropa and the Mediterranean world.
