Wandering in Trieste

To be honest, Trieste had never crossed my mind as a destination until a flurry of articles a couple of years ago about how the city was benefiting from the ban on large cruise ships across the Adriatic in Venice.

My only other connections were Eric Ambler espionage novels and a hazy memory of a post war film Night Train to Venice. But once the articles touched on the city’s complicated history, its location on a tiny sliver of what looks like it should be Slovenia, and its proximity to last year’s cross-border twin European Capitals of Culture the germ started to grow.

How could the story not be fascinating? A city working very hard at being Italian after centuries of Austrian rule, adjoining Slovenian population, and even its own language, Tergestino, almost disappearing in the 19th century as thousands of Venetians migrated to the area, blending their tongue with it.

That migration is part of the great geopolitical shifts of the 19th century and before. Trieste was the most important—nearly only—seaport of the huge Austrian empire. As it grew rapidly in the second half of the 1800s while Venice was declining, the new immigration was welcomed.

Background: Trieste has been Italian since 1918—a date the city will never let you forget. That’s 108 years, minus ten years after the war when it was under international control. But before that it was ruled by Austria for 536 years. In 1382, Trieste put itself under the rule of the Habsburg emperor Leopold III to avoid being conquered by rival Venice.

As the multi-national empires of Europe began to crumble in the late 1800s while the new national states of Italy and Germany consolidated, Trieste and the lands connecting it to Italy became a hotbed of Italian nationalism—along with Slovenian and Croatian nationalist movements.

The last years of Habsburg rule were marked by a spate of projects designed to tie the region closer to Vienna—a new Transalpina rail line to move freight, people and culture, new buildings including an impressive railroad station, and more.

The first years of Italian rule were similarly marked with a flood of projects to rename, rebuild and reshape as an Italian space—In part to mark the separation, and in part to ward off movements of neighboring people who were also a very large portion of Trieste’s population. Layer all that over a history that goes back to a major Roman fort and settlement on the top of the city’s highest hill, and you have a fascinating city to explore and experience.

Turn your back on Piazza Unita, and you’re looking out along the long, long Molo Audace, which splits the city’s old port basins in two. No longer an active pier, it’s a popular recreation spot and one of the key points of the 1918 ‘becoming Italian’ story. The monument below marks the spot where the Italian destroyer Audace arrived on November 3, 1918 to claim the city for Italy.

At the head of the pier, bronze statues honor the arriving sailors and Trieste women who awaited them.

Two lighthouses mark Trieste’s harbor, one Austrian, built in 1833, and one Italian—taller and grander—built in 1927. The Austrian light, Faro la Laterna, was decommissioned in 1969; not only is it smaller and less visible than the other, but the shift of cargo to container ports made it redundant. The Victory Lighthouse, high on the hill, also serves as a memorial to Italian sailors lost in World War I.

Small note: the impressive logo on this waterfront building marks Generali Insurance, the world’s second-largest insurance group; it was founded in Trieste in 1831 and still has its headquarters there and operates worldwide. The building, Palazzo Berlam, now serves as Generali’s training academy.

Turning away from the shore, I headed for Piazza della Borsa, home of the Bourse, and a center of Trieste’s business and shopping since 1806 when it was created from streets and spaces just outside the city walls, and just behind Piazza Unita.

In the Piazza, a pair of political statements. The first belongs to a group that is agitating for a transient past: the period from 1945 to 1954 when the city was under supervision of U.S. and UK forces and attached to neither Italy nor Yugoslavia, which both claimed it and the surrounding territory. The ultimate settlement divided the land, gave the city to Italy, and left this splinter group agitating for it to again be independent—or at least differently dependent.

All that seems of utterly no interest to Gabriele d’Annunzio, poet, soldier, aristocrat and political chameleon. Long identified with the left before World War I, he was strongly nationalist and eventually one of the fathers of Italian fascism. All that seems a far cry from the man reading in the square, occasionally joined by selfie-takers.

Along one side of a street of fancy shops facing the Piazza, this sculpture—is it a human being eaten by a lion or wearing a lion’s head?—marks the facade of a 14th century building built onto what was once one of the city’s gates. Walk through the passageway under the arch and you’ll find yourself in area, the Largo Riborgo, that was once the center of the city’s large Jewish population.

The neighborhood fell, in the 1930s to what Mussolini called a ‘healing pickaxe;’ the traces of Jewish life disappeared, an ancient Roman theatre was uncovered, and a Fascist party headquarters—the Casa del Fascio—was built facing it. The Mussolini-era building is now the police headquarters; between 1945 and 1954 it was the headquarters of Allied Military Government.

Continuing up—and I do mean up—from the Roman theater, I followed narrow and curving streets, headed toward the top, the spot on San Giusto Hill where long-ago Roman commanders built their fort and where later rulers added a castle stronghold, as well as Trieste’s Cathedral of San Giusto Il Martire on top of the remains of Roman temples.

As you climb, a broader view of the city and the harbor emerge; the Romans found it safer up here than among hostile forces from surrounding areas.

Along the way, a view into Trieste’s Garden of Remembrance. After World War I, there was a movement to create a park or avenue of remembrance for soldiers killed in World War I, with each casualty represented by a tree. Many were built, but many have disappeared; Trieste’s remains.

At the top of the hill, at last, the Cathedral and its neighbor, the San Giusto Castle, built for the Austrian garrison starting in 1468 and finished in 1636. Each of the castle’s bastions represents a different style of military architecture because of changes in weapons and engineering over the 200 years of construction. Since 1936, it has been a museum.

In front of the castle are the remnants of buildings in the Roman forum, left more or less as they were uncovered during other work. And, with a spectacular view over the city, yet another monument to the Italian soldiers of World War I.

And, it’s not the last to be seen; The Dying Warrior, a less heroic but nonetheless memorial sculpture awaits at the bottom of the hill, just off Piazza del Borsa.

Trieste’s architecture is heavily into 19th-century buildings, reflecting the growth of the city’s role and population in that period, although there are many older buildings—and relatively few that scream 20th century, although the Palazzo Berlam is a handsome example.

Styles vary as well; many of the buildings could fit easily into Vienna as easily as into a city meant to be Italian. There is also an abundance of really fine ornamental doors, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

Ecclesiastical styles in the city vary more widely; three interesting examples are the 1868 neo-Byzantine Serbian Orthodox church, a future article topic; the classically-styled Church of Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo that sits at the head of Trieste’s remaining canal and the 1950s church of the Claretian Missionaries.

Trieste once had several canals, but now there is only one, running from the harbor to Sant’Antonio. Unlike Venice’s, they were not the city’s ‘streets’ but passageways for ships to enter and load or unload.

And Trieste once had a net work of trams, all but one now replaced by buses. The one survivor is actually a combination of city tram and interurban, as well as a combination of tram and funicular—it has a unique propulsion system to get it up the steep hill to the suburb of Opicina.