Short answers, pulled from the story.
Trieste was the most important seaport of the Habsburg monarchy from 1382 until 1918, growing into the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. It later became the site of the Free Territory of Trieste from 1947 to 1954, a unique UN-protected city-state caught between the Eastern and Western blocs after World War II.
James Joyce lived in Trieste between 1904 and 1915 and worked on both Dubliners and Ulysses while there. He lived at Via San Nicolò No. 30, where his son Giorgio was born, and taught Italo Svevo at the Berlitz School on the same street.
The Free Territory of Trieste was an independent city-state established by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty and placed under United Nations protection. It was divided into Zone A, governed by joint American and British military administration, and Zone B, administered by Yugoslavia. In 1954 the Memorandum of London assigned Zone A including the city to Italy and Zone B to Yugoslavia.
The Risiera di San Sabba was the only Nazi concentration camp with a crematorium on Italian soil, established in a suburb of Trieste on the 4th of April 1944. Between October 1943 and the spring of 1944, approximately 25,000 Jews and partisans were interrogated and tortured there; three to four thousand of them were murdered. It is now a national monument and museum.
Trieste developed a major coffee trade under Austria-Hungary, when the Austro-Hungarian government awarded tax-free status to the city to encourage commerce. Today the port handles more than 40% of Italy's coffee imports, and companies including Illy are headquartered there. The city is still referred to as the coffee capital of Italy.
The bora is a dry, katabatic wind blowing from the northeast that can reach speeds of up to 140 km/h on the port piers of Trieste. It can last for days, drive temperatures below freezing, and is one of the defining features of Trieste's climate alongside hot summers with highs around 29 degrees Celsius.