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Trieste
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Trieste (; ; ; ; ) is a city and port in northeastern Italy very near to the Slovenian border, to the North, East, and South. Trieste is located at the head of the Gulf of Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Throughout its history, it has been influenced by its geographic position at the crossroads of Germanic, Latin and Slavic culture. With a population of 208,614 as of 2007, it is the capital of the autonomous region Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trieste province.
Trieste flourished as part of Austria, from 1382 (the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1867) until 1918 when it was one of the few seaports in what was one of the Great Powers of Europe.
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Encyclopedia
Trieste (; ; ; ; ) is a city and port in northeastern Italy very near to the Slovenian border, to the North, East, and South. Trieste is located at the head of the Gulf of Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Throughout its history, it has been influenced by its geographic position at the crossroads of Germanic, Latin and Slavic culture. With a population of 208,614 as of 2007, it is the capital of the autonomous region Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trieste province.
Trieste flourished as part of Austria, from 1382 (the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1867) until 1918 when it was one of the few seaports in what was one of the Great Powers of Europe. It was among the most prosperous Mediterranean seaports as well as a capital of literature and music. However, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Trieste's annexation to Italy after World War I led to a decline of its economic and cultural importance.
Today, Trieste is a border town. The population is an ethnic mix of the neighbouring regions; The dominant local Venetian dialect of Trieste is called Triestine ("Triestin" - , in Italian "Triestino"). This dialect and the official Italian language are spoken in the city centre, while Slovene is spoken in several of the immediate suburbs. The Venetian and the Slovene languages are considered autochthonous of the area. There are also small numbers of Croatian, German, Hungarian speakers.
The economy depends on the port and on trade with its neighbouring regions. Throughout the Cold War Trieste was a peripheral city, but it is rebuilding some of its former influence.
History
Ancient era
The area of what is now Trieste was settled by the Carni, an Indo-European tribe (hence the name Carso) since the 3rd millennium BC. Subsequently the area was populated by the Histri, an Illyrian people, who remained the main civilization until the 2000 BC, when the Palaeo-Veneti arrived.
By 177 BC, the city was under the rule of the Roman republic. Trieste was granted the status of colony under Julius Caesar, who recorded its name as Tergeste in his Commentarii de bello Gallico (51 BC).
After the end of the Western Roman Empire (in 476), Trieste remained a Byzantine military centre. In 788 it became part of the Frank kingdom, under the authority of their count-bishop. From 1081 the city came loosely under the Patriarchate of Aquileia, developing into a free commune by the end of the 12th century.
Habsburg rule
After two centuries of war against the nearby major power, the Republic of Venice (which occupied it briefly from 1369 to 1372), the burghers of Trieste petitioned Leopold III of Habsburg, Duke of Austria to become part of his domains. (The agreement of cessation was signed in October 1382, in St. Bartholomew's church in the village of Šiška (apud Sisciam), today one of the city quarters of Ljubljana.) The citizens, however, maintained a certain degree of autonomy up until the 17th century.
Trieste grew into an important port and trade hub. It was made a free port within the Habsburg Empire by Emperor Charles VI and remained a free port from 1719 until July 1 1891. The reign of his successor, Maria Theresa of Austria, marked the beginning of a flourishing era for the city.
Trieste was occupied by French troops three times during the Napoleonic Wars, in 1797, 1805 and 1809. In the latter it was annexed to the Illyrian Provinces by Napoleon, during which period Trieste lost its autonomy (even when it was returned to the Austrian Empire in 1813), and the status of free port was interrupted.
Following the Napoleonic Wars, Trieste continued to prosper as the Imperial Free City of Trieste (Reichsunmittelbare Stadt Triest) and it became capital of the Austrian Littoral region, the so-called Küstenland.
The city's role as main Austrian trading port and shipbuilding centre was later emphasized with the foundation of the merchant shipping line Austrian Lloyd in 1836, whose headquarters stood at the corner of the Piazza Grande and Sanitŕ. By 1913 Austrian Lloyd had a fleet of 62 ships comprising a total of 236,000 tons.
The modern Austro-Hungarian Navy also used Trieste's shipbuilding facilities and as a base. The construction of the first major trunk railway in the Empire, the Vienna-Trieste Austrian Southern Railway, was completed in 1857, a valuable asset for trade and the supply of coal.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste was a buzzing cosmopolitan city frequented by artists such as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Sigmund Freud, Dragotin Kette, Ivan Cankar and Umberto Saba. The city was part of the so-called Austrian Riviera and a very real part of Mitteleuropa. The particular Friulian dialect, called Tergestino, spoken until the beginning of the 19th century, was gradually overcome by the Triestine (i.e., a Venetian dialect) and other languages, including Italian, Slovene, and German. While Triestine was spoken by the biggest part of the population, German was the language of the Austrian bureaucracy and Slovene was used in the surrounding villages. Viennese architecture and coffeehouses still dominate the streets of Trieste to this day.
Annexation to Italy
Together with Trento, Trieste was a main focus of the irredentist movement, which aimed for the annexation to Italy of all the lands they claimed were inhabited by culturally Italian people. After the end of World War I, in 1918 Austrian-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, but Trieste became part of Italy in 1920, after a 2 years period of Italian Reign and Austrian jointed government, along with the whole Julian March (Venezia Giulia). The annexation, however, brought a loss of importance for the city, with the new state border depriving it of its former hinterland. The Slovene ethnic group (around 25% of the population according to the 1911 census) suffered persecution by the rising Fascist Regime. This led to a period of inner strain which culminated on April 13 1920, when a group of Italian Fascists burnt the Narodni dom ("National House"), the community hall of Trieste's Slovenes.
World War II
After the constitution of the Italian Social Republic, on 23 September 1943, Trieste was nominally absorbed into this entity. The Germans, however, annexed it to the Operation Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, which also included the former Italian provinces of Gorizia, Ljubljana and Udine led by Friedrich Rainer. Under the Nazi occupation, the only concentration camp on Italian soil was built in a suburb of Trieste, at the Risiera di San Sabba (Rižarna), on 4 April 1944. The city saw a high Italian and Yugoslav partisan activity and suffered from Allied bombings.
Yugoslav and the New Zealand Army involvement
On April 30 1945, the Italian anti-Fascists National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, or CLN) of don Marzari and Savio Fonda, constituted of approximately 3500 volunteers, incited a riot against the Nazis. On May 1, Yugoslav partisans of Tito's army arrived and freed most of the city from the Nazis, except for the courts and the castle of San Giusto, the garrisons here refusing to surrender to any force other than New Zealanders. The 2nd New Zealand Division continued to advance towards Trieste along Route 14 around the northern coast of the Adriatic sea and arrived in the city the next day. The German forces capitulated on the evening of May 2 following their arrival. The Yugoslav troops of Tito held full control of the city until June 12, a period known as the "forty days of Trieste". During this period, many fascists, nationalists and many other people not liked by the Communist regime disappeared. Many were supposedly tossed alive into the potholes ("foibe") of the Carso plateau in a "tit-for-tat" policy of brutality initiated by the Italian fascists in the 1930s. Eventually, the New Zealand Army forced the Yugoslav Army to leave. Trieste and its surrounding regions remained under American & British control until 1954, as the Free City of Trieste.
The City of the Free Territory of Trieste (1947-54)
In 1947, Trieste was declared an independent state under the protection of the United Nations as the Free Territory of Trieste split into two zones, A and B, along what was called The Morgan Line.
From 1947 to 1954, the A Zone was governed by the Allied Military Government, composed of the American "Trieste United States Troops" (TRUST), commanded by Major Geneneral Bryant E. Moore, the commanding general of the American 88th Infantry Division, and the "British Element Trieste Forces" (BETFOR), commanded by Sir Terence Airey, who were the joint forces commander and also the military governors. The southern part of this territory, the B Zone, composed of Istria, roughly the coastline from Muggia to Koper.
Marshall Tito, head of the socialist state of Yugoslavia, made several forays across the Morgan Line and into the A Zone, attempting to wrest control of the city of Trieste away from TRUST and BETFOR. These now-forgotten skirmishes made up the very first battles in what would later become the Cold War.
In 1954, the Free Territory of Trieste was dissolved. The city of Trieste in A Zone was ceded to Italy. The B Zone went to Yugoslavia, along with some of the neighboring villages formerly included in the A Zone. The annexation of Trieste to Italy was officially announced on 26 October 1954.
The final border line with Yugoslavia, and the status of the ethnic minorities there, was settled permanently in 1975 with the Treaty of Osimo. This line is now the boundary between Italy and Slovenia.
Transport
Maritime transport
Trieste's maritime location and its former long term status as part of the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian empires made its dock the major commercial port for much of the landlocked areas of central Europe. In the 19th century, a whole new port district known as the Porto Nuovo was built northeast to the city centre.
In modern times, Trieste's importance as a port has declined, both due to the annexation to Italy, for Italy's wider choice of better located ports, and the competition with the nearby new port of Koper in Slovenia. However, there is significant commercial shipping to the container terminal, steel works and oil terminal, all of which are located to the south of the city centre. After many years of stagnation, a change in the leadership placed the port on a steady growth path, recording a 40% increase in shipping traffic as of 2007.
Rail transport
Railroads came early to Trieste, due to its port and the need to transport people and goods inland. The first railroad line to reach Trieste was the "Sudbahn" in 1857. This railroad stretched for 1400 km to Lviv, Ukraine, via Ljubljana, Slovenia; Sopron,Hungary; Vienna, Austria; and Kraków, Poland, crossing the backbone of the Alps mountains through the Semmering Pass near Graz. This railroad approaches Trieste through the village of Villa Opicina, a few kilometers from the big city but over 300 meters higher in elevation. Due to this, the line takes a 32 kilometer detour to the north, gradually descending in elevation, before terminating at the Trieste Centrale railroad station.
A second trans-Alpine railrad was dedicated in 1906, with the opening of the Transalpina Railway from Vienna, Austria via Jesenice and Nova Gorica. This railroad also approached Trieste via Villa Opicina, but it took a rather shorter loop southwards towards Trieste's other main railroad station, the Trieste Campo Marzio railroad station, south of the central station. This railroad line is no longer operating, and the Campo Marzio railroad station is now merely a railway museum.
In order to facilitate freight traffic between the two stations and the nearby dock areas, a temporary railroad line known as the Rivabahn was built along the waterfront in 1887. This railroad survived until 1981, when it was replaced by the Galleria di Circonvallazione, a 5.7 kilometer railroad tunnel route, to the east of the city. Freight services from the dock area now include container services to northern Italy and to Budapest, Hungary, together with truck piggyback services to Salzburg, Austria and Frankfurt, Germany.
Passenger rail service to Trieste now mostly consists of trains to and from Venice, Italy, connecting with there with trains to Rome and Milan at Mestre. These trains reach the Trieste central station via bypassing the Gulf of Trieste, connecting with the Sudbahn's northern loop. International trains between Italy and Slovenia now pass through Villa Opicina, bypassing Trieste.
Air transport
Trieste is served by the nearby Friuli Venezia Giulia Airport, located at Ronchi near Monfalcone at the head of the Gulf of Trieste.
Local transport
Local public transport in Trieste is operated by Trieste Trasporti, which operates a network of around 60 bus routes and two boat services. They also operate the Opicina Tramway, a unique hybrid tramway and funicular railway that provides a more direct link between the city centre and Villa Opicina.
Sport
Trieste is famous for having two clubs participating in the championships of two different nations at the same time, during the time of the Free Territory of Trieste. Triestina played in the Serie A. Although it faced retrocession after the first season after the second world war, the FIGC changed the rules to keep it in, as it was seen as important to keep a club of the city in the Italian league, while Yugoslavia had its eye on the city.
The next season the club played its best seaon with a 3rd place finish.
Meanwhile, Yugoslavia put money in Ponziana, a small team in Trieste, which under a new name, Amatori Ponziana, played in the Yugoslavian league for a number of years.
Triestina went broke in the nineties, but now ( 2008 ) plays in the Serie B.
Demographics
In 2007, there were 203,356 people residing in Trieste, located in the province of Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, of whom 46.7% were male and 53.3% were female. Minors (children aged 18 and younger) totalled 13.78 percent of the population compared to pensioners who number 27.9 percent. This compares with the Italian average of 18.06 percent (minors) and 19.94 percent (pensioners). The average age of Trieste residents is 46 compared to the Italian average of 42. In the five years between 2002 and 2007, the population of Trieste declined by 3.5 percent, while Italy as a whole grew by 3.85 percent. The birth rate in Trieste is 7.63 per 1,000 one of the lowest in eastern Italy, while the Italian average is 9.45 births.
As of 2006, 93.81% of the population was Italian. The largest autochthonous minority are Slovenes, but there is also a large immigrant group from other Balkan nations (particularly nearby Croatia, but also Serbia, Albania and Romania): 4.95%, Asia: 0.52%, and sub-saharan Africa: 0.2%. Trieste is predominantly Roman Catholic, but also has large numbers of Orthodox Christians due to the city's large migrant population from Eastern Europe and its Balkan influence.
The city's main language is Italian though there are many Slovene, Venetian and Friulan language speakers. There are also groups of German and Hungarian speakers.
Main sights
Castles
The Castle was built between 1856 and 1860 from a project by Carl Junker working under Archduke Maximilian.
The Castle gardens provide a setting of outstanding beauty with a variety of trees, chosen by and planted on the orders of Maximilian, that today make a remarkable collection.
Features of particular attraction in the gardens include two ponds, one noted for its swans and the other for lotus flowers, the Castle annexe ("Castelletto"), a nearby a bronze statue of Maximilian, and a small chapel where is kept a cross made from the remains of the "Novara", the flagship on which Maximilian, brother of Emperor Franz Josef, set sail to become Emperor of Mexico. During the existence of the Free Territory of Trieste, the castle served as headquarters for the United States Army's TRUST force.
Castle of San Giusto
Designed on the remains of previous castles on the site, it took almost two centuries to build. The stages of the development of the Castle's defensive structures are marked by the central part built under Frederick III (1470-1), the round Venetian bastion (1508-9), the Hoyos-Lalio bastion and the Pomis, or "Bastione fiorito" dated 1630.
Churches
- The Cathedral of San Giusto.
- The Serb-Orthodox Temple of Holy Trinity and St. Spiridio (1869). The building adopts the Greek-Cross plan with five cupolas in the Byzantine tradition.
- Basilica of San Silvestro (11th century)
- Church of Santa Maria Maggiore (1682)
- Church of San Nicolň dei Greci (1787). This church by the architect Matteo Pertsch (1818), with bell-towers on both sides of the facade, follows the Austrian late baroque style.
- Israelite Temple (1912)
Archaeological remains
- Arch of Riccardo (33 BC). It is an Augustan gate built in the Roman walls in 33. It stands in Piazzetta Barbacan, in the narrow streets of the old town. It's called Arco di Riccardo ("Richard's Arch") because is believed to have been crossed by King Richard of England on the way back from the Crusades.
- Basilica Forense (2nd century)
- Palaeochristian basilica
- Roman Age Temples" : one dedicated to Athena, one to Zeus, both on the S.Giusto hill.
The temple dedicated to Zeus ruins is next to the Forum , the Athenas is under the basilica, visitors can see his basement .
Roman theatre
Trieste or Tergeste, which probably dates back to the protohistoric period, was enclosed by walls built in 33–32 BC on Emperor Octavian’s orders. The city developed greatly during the 1st and 2nd centuries.
The Roman theatre lies at the foot of the San Giusto hill, facing the sea. The construction partially exploits the gentle slope of the hill, and much of the theatre is made of stone. The topmost portion of the amphitheatre steps and the stage were supposedly made of wood.
The statues that adorned the theatre, brought back to light in the 1930s, are now preserved at the Town Museum. Three inscriptions from the Trajan period mention a certain Q. Petronius Modestus, someone closely connected to the development of the theatre, which was erected during the second half of the 1st century.
Caves
In the whole Trieste province, an amount of 10 speleological groups (24 in Friuli-Venezia Giulia) exist. The Trieste plateau (Altopiano Triestino), called Kras or the Carso and covering an area of about 200 km˛ within Italy has approximately 1500 caves of various sizes. Among the most famous ones are the Grotta Gigante, the largest tourist cave in the world, with a single cavity large enough to contain St Peter's in Rome, and the Cave of Trebiciano (350 m deep) at the bottom of which flows the Timavo River. This river dives underground at Škocjan Caves in Slovenia (they are on UNESCO list) and flows about 30 km before emerging about 1 km from the sea in a series of springs near Duino reputed by the Romans to be an entrance to Hades.
Others
Literature
Many famous authors lived and created their major works in Trieste. They include:
Italian language authors
- Enzo Bettiza, writer and journalist, born in Split
- Mauro Covacich, writer and journalist
- Virgilio Giotti, poet
- Claudio Magris, writer and essayist
- Biagio Marin, poet (born in Grado)
- Pino Roveredo, writer
- Umberto Saba, poet
- Scipio Slataper, essayist
- Giani Stuparich, writer and essayist
- Italo Svevo, novelist
- Susanna Tamaro, novelist
- Fulvio Tomizza, writer, born in Istria (now in Croatia)
Slovene language authors
German language authors
Other writers
Other famous people
- Lidia Bastianich, acclaimed Italian-American chef and TV cooking show host whose family lived in a Triestian refugee camp after their escape from Istria in 1957
- Mathilde Bonaparte, Napoleon's niece, daughter of his brother Jerome Bonaparte was born here in 1820 and died in the early 20th century
- Ludwig Boltzmann, Austrian physicist
- Demetrio Carciotti, (Dimitrios Karitsiotis), Greek merchant and important patron of Greece
- Leo Castelli, New York art dealer who established one of the world's leading vanguard galleries in the second half of the 20th century
- Avgust Cernigoj, Slovene painter
- Lavo Cermelj, Slovene physisicist and public intellectual
- Biaggio Chianese, Italian boxer
- George Dolenz, actor and father of Micky Dolenz of the Monkees
- Almerigo Grilz, journalist, freelance war reporter and politician
- Boris M. Gombac, Slovenian historian
- Margherita Hack, Italian astronomer
- Ernesto Illy, Entrapreneur, founder of coffee empire
- Doro Levi, archaeologist
- Franko Luin, Swedish-Slovene graphic designer
- Cesare Maldini, former AC Milan captain, Italian football team manager.
- , architect partner of Marion Weiss in New York-based Weiss/Manfredi
- Edoardo Marzari, priest
- Mauro Maur, Italian trumpet player and composer
- Jože Pirjevec, Slovene historian
- Alberto Randegger, composer
- Ivan Rendic, Croatian sculptor
- Mitja Ribicic, Slovene Communist leader, President of the Yugoslav Government (1969-1971)
- Tanja Romano, world champion of skating
- Edvard Rusjan, Slovene aircraft constructor and pilot
- Abdus Salam, Pakistani theoretical physicist
- Denis Sciama, British physicist
- Igor Škamperle, sociologist, novelist and mountaineer
- Alex Staropoli, keyboardist of the band Rhapsody of Fire
- Elisa Toffoli, Nationally renowned singer/songwriter, pianist, and guitarist
- Viktor Sulcic, Argentine-Slovene architect (born in the suburb of Santa Croce/Križ)
- Max Tonetto, an Italian winger playing for AS Roma
- Luca Turilli, guitarist of the band Rhapsody of Fire
- Tone Tomšic, partisan hero
- Primož Trubar, Slovene Protestant reformer
- Marta Verginella, Slovene historian
- Vittorio Vidali (aka Enea Sormenti, Jacobo Hurwitz Zender, Carlos Contreras), Communist agent
- Ivan Vidav, Slovene mathematician
- Boris Ziherl, Slovene Communist leader and Marxist philosopher
- Sigismund Zois, Slovene mecenate and natural scientist
- Hans Christian Andersen, Danish fairy tales author
- Jules Verne, French tales author, lived in Trieste for a few times and write the novela " La congiura di Trieste".
- Piero Cappuccilli, Famous Baritone of the 20th Century
Twin towns
See also
Further reading
External links
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