The beach as microcosm of a cosmopolitan city: Imagining and experiencing urban encounters at Trieste's Pedocin beach

This article focuses on the nature of beaches as places of urban encounters, critically examining the cosmopolitanized discourse of Trieste’s urban identity by exploring the dynamics of urban ‘world-making’ at Trieste’s Pedocin beach. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the recent documentary L’Ultima Spiaggia (The Last Resort) (Anastopoulos and Del Degan, 2016) moves away from the poetic elite imaginations that have fashioned cultural narratives of Trieste. The film represents a cosmopolitan experience, which, for Trieste’s beachgoers, is not enclosed in the moment of encounter with diversity and the other. Cosmopolitanism, here, is rather the individual capacity to live between the overlapping urban realities that the triestini inhabit, and yet within their own internal moment.