Have you ever heard of Gorizia? Probably not, and yet it is decidedly pretty. It sits in the far north-eastern corner of Italy, where the Latin map frays into the Slavic. The centre is all pink arcades, pistachio green shutters, and palazzi painted in faded yellow. Beyond everything is the great pale wall of the Julian Alps. 

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The town has had at least three names – Gorizia, Görz, Gorica – because for centuries it was Habsburg, then Austro-Hungarian. That is to say: it was a quintessentially multilingual city, full of Italians, Slovenes, Friulians, Germans and Jews, halfway between Trieste and Vienna. Some called it the ‘Austrian Nice’. Imperial officials came here to die of tranquil old age. 

The morning after my arrival, I sit at a table in the autumn sun, eating a slice of strudel – flaky, warm, delicious. Close to my table stands a statue of a slender young man. His name was Carlo Michelstaedter, and he was the town’s youthful philosopher. In October 1910, aged just 23, he finished his masterpiece, on the impossibility of living authentically in the modern, nationalistic world – and shot himself the very same day. Which makes him emblematic. Because here’s the strange truth of Gorizia: every suicidal catastrophe modern Europe has inflicted upon itself also happened, quite intensely, in this one dainty town. You can walk them in a day. And so, strudel finished, I do just that. 

First, I stroll down to the Isonzo river, which threads around Gorizia. There are whooping kayakers out........

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