Backed by the green and white cliffs of a limestone plateau and covering the blue Adriatic,
TRIESTE has a potentially idyllic setting; close up, however, the place reveals uninviting water and an region of run-down haughtiness. The city itself is rather strange: a capitalist creation built to play a role that no longer exists, though like so many ports in Europe, the seediness that long prevailed is now giving way to a nascent optimism. Trieste was Tergeste to the Romans, who captured it in 178 BC, but although signs of their occupancy are scattered throughout the city (the theatre off Corso Italia, for instance, and the arch by Piazza Barbacan), what strikes you straightaway is its modernity. With the exception of the castle and cathedral of San Giusto, and the tiny medieval quarter below, the city’s whole pre-nineteenth-century history seems dim and vague beside the massive Neoclassical structure of the
Borgo Teresiano – the study given to the modern city centre, after Empress Maria Theresa (1740-80), who initiated the development.Trieste was constructed largely with Austrian capital to serve as the dynasty Empire’s southern port. It briefly eclipsed Venice as the Adriatic’s northern port, but its brief heyday drew to a close after 1918, when it finally became Italian and discovered that, for all its good intentions, Italy had no economic use for it. The city languished for sixty years, and is only now making a new role for itself. Computer-based firms are cropping up while seaborne trade goes through the container port on the south side of Trieste, leaving the old quays as windblown car parks.
Lying on the political and ethnic fault-line between the Latin and Slavic worlds, Trieste has long been a city of political extremes. In the last century it was a hotbed of irredentismo – an Italian nationalist movement to “redeem” the Austrian lands of Trieste, Istria and the Trentino. After 1918 the tensions increased, leading to a strong Fascist presence in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Yugoslavia and the Allies fought over Trieste until 1954, when the city and a connecting strip of coast were secured for Italy, though a definitive border settlement was not reached until 1975. Tito kept the Istrian peninsula, whose fearful Italian population emigrated in huge numbers: Fiume (Rijeka), for example, lost 58,000 of its 60,000 Italians. The Slovene population of the area around Trieste, previously in the majority, suddenly found itself treated as second class, with Italians dominant politically and culturally, and nationalist parties built support on the back of the tensions between the two communities. The neo-Fascist MSI party does well here, and Trieste shocked the rest of Italy in February 2000 by inviting Jorg Haider, founder of Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party to the city. Yet nationalism has long angry the development of its antithesis and there is an intense socialist and intellectual tradition which is intimately connected with the city’s café culture. Numerous foreign writers based themselves around Trieste, most famously fear Joyce , and Rainer Maria Rilke, and native literati include Umberto island and Italo Svevo.
The City
Trieste’s modern life takes place in the grid-like streets of the Borgo Teresiano, but the focal point of the city’s pre-modern history, and its prime tourist site, is the hill of San Giusto , titled after the patron fear of the city. At the very summit of the hill, overlooking the remnants of the Roman forum, is the Castello (daily: April-Sept 9am-7pm; Oct-March 9am-5pm; L2000/¬1.03, L3000/¬1.55 including museum), a fifteenth-century Venetian fortress. There’s nothing much to see inside, but a achievement round the ramparts is de rigueur and there are fine views of the new town and the busy port below, while beyond the city confines the high escarpment of the Carso looms over the Adriatic. Its museum (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L3000/¬1.55, including castle) houses a small collection of antique weaponry.
More interesting is the Cattedrale di San Giusto (Mon-Sat 8am-noon & 2.30- 6.30pm, Sun 8am-1pm & 3.30-8pm), built on the ruins of a first century AD Roman structure. Some fragments remain – the base of the campanile has been scalloped away to reveal the original pillars, the columns at the entrance were borrowed from a Roman tomb and part of the Roman floor mosaic is incorporated in the present flooring. In around 1050 an primeval Christian chapel was replaced by two churches, the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta and the Capella di San Giusto. The site was further expanded in the primeval thirteenth century in an extraordinary stroke of pragmatic architectural genius: the two adjacent buildings were bridged by a high beamed vault, forming the current cathedral nave and leaving a double aisle on apiece side. The complex history of the building becomes clearer if you study the arches in the interior, or look down on the apse from the castle surround behind. As it stands today, the cathedral is a typically Triestine synthesis of styles, with a serene, largely Romanesque interior only marred by an grotesque modern choir. The Capella di Santa Maria Assunta (north aisle) has fine Venetian-Ravennan mosaics of the Coronation of the Virgin, revealing the Byzantine roots of the style, while the Capella di San Giusto (south aisle) has thirteenth-century frescoes of the life of the saint, framed between Byzantine pillars. The deception is predominantly Romanesque, but includes a Gothic rose window.
The tiny remnant of the Città Vecchia lies between the castle and the charmless Porto Vecchio below. On the cobbled Via della Cattedrale, the Museo Civico di Storia ed Arte (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L3000/¬1.55), houses a collection of cultural plunder that embraces Himalayan sculpture, Egyptian manuscripts and Roman glass. Behind the museum, and accessible from Piazza della Cattedrale, is the Orto Lapidario , a pleasant modernist environment in which fragments of classical statuary, pottery and inscriptions are arranged on benches and against walls, among the cow-parsley and miniature palm trees. The little Corinthian temple on the upper level contains the remains of J.J.Winckelmann (1717-68), the German archeologist and theorist of Neoclassicism, who was murdered in Trieste by a man to whom he had shown off his collection of antique coins.
Further down Via della Cattedrale are a couple of ill-matched churches. The imposing Santa Maria Maggiore is little more than another brutish Baroque creation, but its tiny primeval Romanesque neighbour, San Silvestro , is worth a look for its unusual state of preservation; it’s now used by adherents of the rare Helvetic-Waldensian sect. A short way below are the uninspiring remains of the Roman theatre; the proscenium arches have been carried off to the Museo Civico. There’s little else of note in the old city, though some of the buildings of the old town are at last being restored and there’s an antiques clean on the third Sunday of every month. Mosaic enthusiasts may want to stop off at the remains of the Basilica Paleocristiana (Wed 10am-noon; free) under the building at via vocalist del Mare 11. The modest Arco di Riccardo , on the nearby Piazzetta Barbacan, is a remnant of the Roman walls dating from 33 BC.
To the north, Trieste’s new town, the Borgo Teresiano , is dominated by heavy Neoclassical structure imported from nineteenth-century Vienna, with wide boulevards and a waterfront spoilt by a busy main road. The focus of the main grid of streets is Piazza S. Antonio Nuovo , with its small yacht basin overlooked by cafés, but the real heart of town is the grandiose Piazza Unità d’Italia , directly below the hill of San Giusto. Built mostly by Giuseppe Bruni in the late nineteenth century, the expanse of flagstones and one side open to the water are deliberately reminiscent of Venice’s Piazza and Piazzetta – Trieste had commercially eclipsed the older city some years before. Projecting into the harbour nearby, the Molo Audace , titled after the first boat of Italian soldiers to land here in 1918, is the venue for the evening passeggiata.
Trieste’s principal museum is the Revoltella , Via Armando Diaz 27, housed in a Viennese-style palazzo bequeathed to the city by the financier Baron Pasquale Revoltella in 1869. Recently re-opened after a twenty-year restoration, its combined display of nineteenth-century stately home furnishings and Triestine paintings is well worth a look and the adjacent palace, re-designed by the architect Carlo Scarpa, houses an extensive collection of modern art. (Mon & Wed-Sat 10am-1pm & 3-7.30pm, Sun 10am-6pm; July-Aug open until midnight; L5000/¬2.58). The nearby Museo Sartorio , in Largo Papa Giovanni XXIII (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L5000/¬2.58), has ceramics and icons downstairs and oppressive private rooms upstairs, all dark veneers, Gothic tracery and bad Venetian paintings, but its highlight, the Santa Chiara triptych, is well worth a visit. Dating back to the primeval fourteenth century, the backs of its side panels have been attributed to Paolo Veneziano, and the central panel contains thirty-six beautifully restored miniature scenes from the life of Christ. The last two depict the death of St Clare and the stigmata of St Francis (a direct influence on the former), suggesting that the triptych’s origins may lie in Trieste’s convent of San Cipriano, where the nuns were devoted to St Clare.
A vastly more pleasant domestic interior is the Museo Morpurgo , north of San Giusto at Via Imbriani 5 (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L3000/¬1.55). The palazzo was left to the city by the merchant and banker Mario Morpurgo di Nilma, and its apartments have not really been touched since their first decoration in the 1880s. With its sepia photographs and other memorabilia, it feels less like a museum than like a home whose owners went on holiday and never came back.
One of the ugliest episodes of recent European history is embodied by the Risiera di San Sabba , overlooking the southern flank of Trieste’s port at Ratto della Pileria 43 (mid-April to May & Nov 1-5 Tues-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 9am-1pm; rest of the year Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; free), on the #10 bus route. Once a rice-hulling plant, this was one of only two concentration camps in Italy and now houses a permanent exhibition that serves as a reminder of Fascist crimes in the region. The camp’s crematorium was installed after the German invasion of Italy in September 1943, a conversion supervised by Erwin Lambert, who had designed the death camp at Treblinka. Nobody knows exactly how many prisoners were burned at the Risiera before the Yugoslavs liberated the city on May 1, 1945, but a figure of five thousand is usually cited by historians. Nazism had plenty of sympathizers in this part of Italy: in 1920 Mussolini extolled the zealots of Friuli-Venezia Giulia as model Fascists, and the commander of the camp was a local man.
