Friuli Venezia Giulia

The easternmost corner of Italy, where the country ends at a border that has been redrawn several times in living memory and the culture reflects every one of those shifts: Venetian, Habsburg, Slovenian, and Italian in proportions that vary from one valley to the next. Trieste is the city that this creates at its most concentrated — a port that was the third-largest in the Habsburg Empire, that had a literary café culture in the early twentieth century to rival Vienna's, and that still feels unlike anywhere else in Italy. The wine country of Collio and the Colli Orientali, behind Trieste and Gorizia, produces white wines of a seriousness that is only beginning to get the international attention it has long deserved.Our Friuli coverage explores the region's complexity with the respect it commands.