How Was Trieste Built

Trieste is the only large Italian city that was essentially planned, and it was planned by Vienna.

The old hill

The Roman and medieval town sat on the hill of San Giusto, around a forum and a theatre whose remains are still exposed at the foot of the slope. The cathedral there is two earlier churches merged into one in the fourteenth century, with an asymmetrical front and a mosaic apse.

The Borgo Teresiano

From the 1750s the salt pans below the hill were filled and a grid laid over them, cut by the Canal Grande so that ships could unload directly at warehouses. It is neoclassical, regular and deliberately un-Italian.

Nineteenth-century money

The great facades on Piazza Unità — the town hall, the Lloyd headquarters, the government palace — went up between the 1870s and 1905 in the ornate style of the late empire, competing with each other for status.

Miramare

Built between 1856 and 1860 on a headland north of the city for Archduke Maximilian, who left it to become emperor of Mexico and was shot there in 1867. Its park was planted with species from every continent.

The Risiera

A rice-husking plant built in 1913, requisitioned in 1943, and converted to a detention camp with a crematorium. Its postwar redesign as a monument deliberately left the industrial shell legible.

Places of worship

The Serbian Orthodox church on the canal, the Greek Orthodox church on the seafront, the Lutheran church and the synagogue of 1912 were all built by trading communities with money, and their scale is a measure of how much money.

The Fascist decades

The regime built heavily along the seafront and cut a monumental stair up the hill, and much of the twentieth-century skyline is theirs.