We're exploring our options to get from Nice to Trieste (1st week in July). We've been using Skyscanner & Rome2Rio so have some of the basic options in front of us.
Flying: We only do non-stop hops (i.e., no connecting flights, to avoid the associated stress) so would be open to a flight into some place we wouldn't mind staying a few days, if that place was a direct connect to Trieste. That said, there are very few places are a direct flight into Trieste -- and even fewer that are direct out of Nice. We are open to traveling from Nice to, say, Marseille if that gave better options -- but so far it doesn't appear to. Milan is a distant potential; Rome is off the list.
Train: Admittedly, the actual July train options are not yet posted this far in advance so this may prove to be the most viable path. We'd like a train with no/minimal connections.
Drive: DH thinks driving could be the easiest. To avoid the 'rent in one country return in another' situation, we'd likely need to go to, say, Genoa, rent a car, drive to Trieste, and turn it in.
All that said, are we losing sight of a bigger picture? Is Trieste worth all this fretting???
This all began rather spur-of-the-moment (because of a conference that was going to be in Trieste and we later decided not to attend). But by that time we'd been looking into Trieste (found out that illy was founded in Trieste) so it remained on our "interesting places to see" list as an interesting (& new) place to stick our map-pin in.
(Background: This is just a smallish segment in the latter part of a multi-week itinerary where we'll have been in Spain & France for 1-month++ and will be working our way from Nice to (eventually) Ireland, over the latter 3 or so weeks of the trip. Trieste -> Munich -> Ireland seems doable to get out of Trieste; it's getting into Trieste that is proving to be the challenge.)
Thanks in advance for ideas and input (pro & con).