has had a long and interesting history

Roman:  The site of several "castellieri", or walled villages, the Karst and the coast below it were already strategically placed at a crossroad between east and west, north and south. On the hill of San Giusto, Tergeste (market-town in Paleo-Venetian) became a Roman colony in 52 BC. The Roman theatre still remains, but its open view on the sea has been unfortunately blocked by the Police headquarters...	Medieval:  The hill of San Giusto, with its cathedral, was connected to the harbor, in what is now the old city, while to the north lay the salt ponds.  A keen sense of municipal pride was not sufficient to guard little Trieste from the violence of its neighbours, particularly greedy Venice, and in 1382 AD the city  sought protection by pledging submission to the Hapsburgs.
Commercial:  At the beginning of the XVIII century, the Hapsburgs decided to make Trieste into the main harbor of their empire, declared it a duty-free port, and built a modern town over the salt ponds. Traders flocked in from all corners of Europe and the Mediterranean, Greeks, Turks, Jews, Slavs, Hungarians, the population swell from 5,000 to 200,000 and made the city appear, to Karl Marx, the New York of the Adriatic.	Literary:  James Joyce, who lived in Trieste the first ten years of his self-imposed exile, and Italo Svevo, who from his much younger and more self-confident English teacher came to appreciate his own literary talent, are but two of the many writers whose diverse life trajectories interected with the busy affairs of Trieste.
Tragic:  After the first World War, Trieste and Istria became part of Italy, soon taken over by Fascist rule. Fascism's forced Italianization of the Slavic population was to be only a prelude to the horrors of the second World War. In 1943 the region was annexed to the German Reich. The Risiera di San Sabba was used as a transit station for Jews and many others to be sent to Auschwitz and, equipped with a crematorium, the only one in Italy, for the direct extermination of partisans and civilian hostages.	Scientific:  Trieste's modern renaissance came from an unexpected side: science. Besides ICTP and SISSA, who are hosting the meeting, several other international scientific institutions, like the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, along with the University, attract thousands of scientists to spend from days to years in Trieste, making it the European region with the highest percent of scientists in the population.