TRIESTE, Italy — I love this place. I don’t know why. I wasn’t born here, I wasn’t raised here, I’ve never lived or run away from here. I didn’t even fall in love here, strolling of an evening in the breathtaking Piazza Unità, one of its four sides gazing out to sea.

I think I like Trieste because it’s a boundary of geography, the mind and more. Tucked in Italy’s northeastern corner, it’s Latin, Germanic, Slavic. It’s Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish. It’s a place of literature and trade. The south stops here: The Adriatic Sea laps Europe’s shore, then decides it can’t go any further. The north stops here: The Karst plateau is a terrace for the Continent, and over the centuries the people of Vienna visited to enjoy the view. The east stops here: The sighs of Russia have never gone any farther. The west stops here: NATO bases ready to beat back invaders from the Warsaw Pact remain scattered around.

Trieste was created by the Hapsburg Empire, which owned little coast. In the early 1700s it was just a large village of fishermen, salters, market gardeners. The empire made it into a port, with a monopoly on imports and exports, privileged levies, soft railway tariffs — a world that wilted to a close a century ago. Since then, Trieste has been through an awful lot. It was won back by Italy in 1918, then chosen as Fascism’s iconic city. It was occupied by the Nazis in 1943, then taken by the Yugoslav Communists in 1945. In 1947, Trieste was put under Anglo-American military government; only in 1954 was it restored to the Italian state.

Today, at long last, it is a prosperous, peaceful European city. The seaport, shipbuilding, coffee and insurance companies and scientific research institutions provide employment for all. But it is a city forever shifting politically, sitting at the sliding fault line of European power.