Rijeka

I signed up for a Rick Steves Best of the Adriatic tour partly because of historic connections with Hungary. On the tour I learned about, and tasted, even more such connections. The Rijeka connection still fascinates me.
I knew that we would be stopping for a few hours in the nearby resort town of Opatija, but not in Rijeka itself. So I was glad that the weather that day provided a good view across the bay of Rijeka's sprawl (as the RS guidebook puts it).

When my Hungarian grandmother, Mary Barkó, sailed from Rijeka [Fiume] 112 years ago this week, likely that city sprawled less in both the vertical and horizontal directions. Still, her last view of what was then the Austria-Hungary Dual Monarchy would have looked something like the background above.
I have read that Hungarians today sometimes bypass their own country's Lake Balaton, seeking water fun instead on islands in the Adriatic near Rijeka. But already in the early 1900's, some Hungarians were not traveling to the Adriatic to escape. Those who already had good fortune went just for fun. For example, the Hungarian author Dezső Kosztolányi in the early 1930's reminisced about his 1903 high-school-graduation-present trip to the Adriatic (Kornél Esti, trans. Bernard Adams, 2011, New Directions Books, ISBN 978-0-8112-1843-6). Part of the romance and excitement of anyone's trip to the Adriatic in those days would have been the train's descent from the ridges behind Rijeka.
Below is a view of Opatija itself, looking in the opposite direction from the view above.

The RS guidebook (p. 165) has this to say about a close-up view of Rijeka today:

Like Opatija, much of Rijeka's architecture is reminiscent of the glory days of the Hapsburgs. But unlike Opatija, most of Rijeka's buildings haven't been renovated, giving it a seedy, gritty, past-its-prime feel.

My close-up impression of Rijeka, seen only from inside the tour bus, was a glass half full. So I plan to go back some day for a closer look.