Where you travel from

Choose the city you are starting from – Trieste, Venice, Ljubljana, Klagenfurt, Vienna or Munich – and the tool ranks the eight areas of Friuli Venezia Giulia from the nearest to the furthest by car, with the nearest airport to each. It answers a planning question: how a day of viewings, or a visit by a board or an investment committee, fits around the journey.

Each area is measured to one town, named beside the time: Trieste to Piazza Unità, the coast and the Karst to Sistiana, the Isonzo corridor to Monfalcone, the Collio to Gorizia, the Friulian coast to Lignano Sabbiadoro, the eastern hills to Udine, western Friuli to Pordenone and the Alps to Tarvisio. A property elsewhere in the same area can be nearer or further. On the coast, Grado lies east of Lignano; in the Alps, Tarvisio sits at the eastern end, close to the Austrian and Slovenian borders, while Sappada and Forni di Sopra are further west.

The times are calculated, not observed. They come from a routing engine (OSRM) run on OpenStreetMap data, without traffic, then increased by a fixed margin and rounded up: they are for getting your bearings, not for timing a meeting. They leave out queues, roadworks, snow, border checks and stops.

The rule is fixed and written below the result: the routing engine’s seconds, divided by sixty, multiplied by the margin factor and rounded up to the next five minutes. The site reads the stored figure and does not recalculate it, so the same journey shows the same time on every page. Anyone with the same open data can reproduce a time read here.

The tool does not compare areas on anything other than distance, and it does not say which area suits a given use.

By rail. Between Trieste and Vienna there is one direct train a day in each direction; between Trieste and Ljubljana there are no direct trains.

By air. There are no direct flights from Trieste Airport to Munich or Vienna. The airports the tool considers are Trieste, Venice, Ljubljana and Klagenfurt: which one is nearest depends on the area, and the time shown is the drive from the area’s town to that airport, again without traffic. It is not always Trieste: for Pordenone it is Venice, and for the Alps it is Klagenfurt.

From Klagenfurt. The shortest road crosses Slovenia, by the Loibl Pass; by the motorway through Tarvisio the journey takes longer. The tool shows the time of the shorter route.

The data. Road data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence; the calculation and the margin are ours. The times were measured on the date stated below the result.