Gorizia’s post-war watchtowers and cyclone fences remain but you can now, of course, meet the border on your own Eurozone terms: put your right foot in and shake it all about, or hop, amble or drive out of Italy without even a flash of a passport. (The Slovenian new town, Nova Gorica, on the other side is far from pretty, but its shops, bars and casinos pulse with life while the original Gorizia slumbers.) Cold War absurdity aside, this small, stately city has long been a mutable, and cannily self-assured, place, its winding inner streets awash with multi-tongued ghosts, their trade and negotiation, faith, art and war.

Palazzo Lantieri is not a hotel but a private home, the guests that came before you a ripe assortment of popes, poets and playwrights, warriors, radicals and Hapsburg royals. It’s as discreet as it is elegant, a former 14th-century fortress turned noble house unassuming behind high walls, and its owners Carolina Lantieri and Niccolò Piccolomini are jovial and generous hosts.

The bedrooms have astonishingly beautiful antiques, towering stufas and echoing parquetry floors, yet its infused with an easy, enveloping warmth. Outside is a wonderful garden, its bowers and paths modelled in the Persian style, leading to a darkly canopied apex. It’s calm and intriguingly labyrinthine, mannered but with the reassuring markers of everyday life: a wendy house, ponds with a tiny becalmed boat and the frolicking family beagle (who recently made his film debut in a Werner Herzog film we are told).

Today’s Lantieri faces are mirrored in several centuries of portraits that line the public reception rooms, but they are a family firmly of the times. Large site-specific installations by Jannis Kounellis, Jan Fabre and Michelangelo Pistoletto and works by Getulio Alviani, Giulio Paolini and Donatella Spaziani now form an integral part of the palazzo’s art collection. These contemporary works are inspired by, and continue to interact with, the objects and architecture of other eras. In the former cellars, Clementina Lantieri, Carolina’s sister, has a ceramics studio, holding classes as well as selling works known for their graceful form and jewel-like glazes.

The family can suggest places to eat in walking distance or the best dining rooms in the countryside – the local food is enthralling even if some dishes, like the dustily sweet or astringently herbal filled raviolis, and a preponderance of game, can be a jolt for those still expecting familiar Italian flavours. Dishes are often startlingly different even from the stalwartly Friulian cuisine of Udine, under an hour away, or the Venetian-influenced food of Grado, on the nearby coast. My memory, perhaps clouded by the superb (and, when here, cheap) Collio Goriziano or Colli Orientali whites, recalls first the colours of the food: all red and white and deep brown and green, seemingly the landscape writ large on the plate. Its tastes too are of the earth, rich and comforting, but also of empires and trade routes distant in time if not place. If you were to eat only one thing, though, it should be the gubana, a flaky, filled snail of a pastry. This nutty, fruity, boozy roll can be found elsewhere in eastern Friuli (and across the border too, the name coming from the Slovenian word ‘gubat’, which, loosely translated, means ‘how we roll’), but Gorizians like to claim their own as exemplar.

The city itself is not without things to see, including a magnificently-sited 13th-century castle, a blingy Baroque cathedral with Gothic chapel attached, an 18th-century synagogue and ghetto streets, their former gates garlanded with serpents and flowers, not to mention a harrowing WWI museum and various memorials to this bitterly contested front. And the afore mentioned minute-to-midnight era mementos. But there would be nothing at all wrong with making a journey here to simply go to sleep in such surrounds, and to wake to the deep green silence of the Lantieri garden.

All images © Donna Wheeler