JAMES JOYCE – TRIESTE
The statue of James Joyce was created by the Trieste sculptor Nino Spagnoli and placed in Ponterosso on the Grand Canal in 2004 to commemorate the centenary of the Irish writer’s arrival in Trieste.
Under the statue a plaque
recalls the writer’s deep bond with the city of Trieste. The 16th June of every year in Trieste since 2010 is Bloomsday the symbolic date in which James Joyce’s scholars and passionate readers all over the world celebrate the Irish writer. of the hero of the novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, through the streets of his Dublin.
James Joyce arrived in Trieste on October 20, 1904 with his partner Nora Barnacle to work as a teacher at the Berlitz School. Unfortunately the place was no longer available and was sent to Pula where there was a new school location. He returned to Trieste in 1905 at the birth of his first son Giorgio and in the meantime he was joined by his brother Stanislaus who began to work at the Berlitz School. In 1907, after a period in Rome where he worked as a clerk at Nast, Kolb & Schumacher Bank, he returned to Trieste. Here he lectured on behalf of the Popular University and published Chamber Music. He began to teach private students belonging to the Trieste high bourgeoisie, including Italo Svevo. Between the two began a deep relationship of friendship and mutual respect.
Italo Svevo had already published his first two books “Una Vita” and “Senilità”, but no one had dealt with them. Joyce read them and urged Svevo to keep writing. Meanwhile Joyce’s life was divided between private lessons, the chair at the Revoltella Higher School of Commerce, the conferences at the Popular University and his first publications Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners also arrived. He began to design the first parts of the Ulysses.
At the outbreak of the First World War he had to leave Trieste for Zurich to return in October 1919, remaining there until June 1920. During this period Joyce wrote Nausicaa and Oxen of the Sun, two episodes of Ulysses, and began the episode entitled Circe. He moved to Paris and never returned to Trieste. Ulysses was published in 1922.
IL PALAZZO DEL GOVERNO – PIAZZA UNITA’ D’ITALIA – TRIESTE
Built between 1901 and 1905, inspired by the architecture of the Renaissance and the style of the Viennese Secession, designed by the Viennese architect Immanuel Artmann, it was the seat of the Austrian Lieutenancy.
It is a wonderful building embellished by a Florentine loggia with a decoration of Murano glass mosaics.
In the upper part of the external facade, facing the square, there are drawings, allegorical heads and medallions with the coat of arms of the House of Savoy made after the First World War, replacing the original mosaics, designed by Giuseppe Straka of Vienna, which featured elements of Austrian derivation . Today the building houses the offices of the Government Commissariat in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region as well as those of the Prefecture. High personalities of the State and of Foreign States, on an official visit to the city and the region, are welcomed by the large and majestic halls of national government representation.
PALAZZO VANOLI – PIAZZA UNITA’ D’ITALIA – TRIESTE
Palazzo Vanoli which is currently the site of the Grand Hotel Duchi D’Aosta, already in ancient times from the fourteenth-century “Hospitium Magnum” to the Renaissance “Locanda del Porto”, gave hospitality to foreign merchants who came to Trieste to stock up on sailors and goods .
In 1700 it became the “Locanda Grande” owned by the Municipality and the main hotel in the city. The emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and Admiral Orazio Nelson stayed there, among others.
The inn was restored around 1767 by the Udine architect Giovanni Fusconi and on June 8, 1768, the archaeologist and art historian J. Winckelmann, who was staying there, was assassinated by the chef Francesco Arcangeli. The “Locanda Grande” was demolished in 1867 and in its place, in 1873, the architects Eugenio Geiringer and Giovanni Righetti built the current building with the function of hotel and restaurant.
Originally it was called Hotel Garni, then Vanoli managed by the hotelier Pietro Vanoli, where in 1912 electricity was introduced. From 1972 it became the Gran Hotel Duchi d’Aosta and Harry’s Bar, owned by the Benvenuti family.
PALAZZO PITTERI- PIAZZA UNITA’ D’ITALIA – TRIESTE
The building originally housed the Piccardi houses and the Locanda Grande, accommodation for passing foreigners, then in 1780, by order of the shopkeeper Domenico Plenario, the architect Ulderico Moro designed a building in the Triestine neoclassical style with baroque influences and rococo. In 1801 the palace was bought by Giovanni Lovovitz. In 1834 the entire property passed to the scholar Riccardo Pitteri. In 1880 the Caffè Flora was opened on the ground floor at the behest of Giuseppe Mander. During the day the Café was the meeting place for the choristers of the Verdi theater, located adjacent to the Piazza, while at night it was frequented by the proletarian inhabitants of Cittavecchia. In 1982 the architects Celli and Tognon made a general renovation of the building. The building later became the property of the Lloyd Adriatico insurance company.
PALAZZO MODELLO – PIAZZA UNITA’ D’ITALIA – TRIESTE
Next to Palazzo Stratti stands the Model Building designed, on behalf of the Municipality, in 1870 by the architect Giuseppe Bruni, the same architect as the Town Hall Building.
The name Model was chosen because it had to be an architectural model for the renovation of the Piazza Grande. It occupies the place where the two churches of San Rocco and San Pietro were located at the north-east entrance of the square. The civic chapel of San Pietro during the Middle Ages was also the seat of civil justice debates and was flanked at the end of the plague in 1602 by the chapel of San Rocco. The chapel of San Pietro was demolished in 1822 and the church of San Rocco in 1869.
The Model Building was rented as an inn by the Hotel Delorme, named after its manager the Frenchman Antonio Delorme, cook of Baron Pasquale Revoltella. A prestigious hotel with rooms and apartments also for large families, toilets on each floor, restaurant and views of the square and the sea, and fairly low prices. The hotel closed in 1912 and since 2008 has housed the offices and management of Acegas-Aps, the company that manages water, gas and electricity supply services.
Original are the statues, the Telamons, located on the top floor, sculpted in the act of touching the genitals in a superstitious gesture.
CITTAVECCHIA – VIA DONOTA – TRIESTE
Often, to return to my home
I take a dark street in the old city.
Yellow is reflected in some puddle
a few lights, and the street is crowded.
Here among the people who come and go
from the tavern to the house or to the brothel,
where the detritus are goods and men
of a great sea port,
I find, passing, infinity
in humility.
Here a prostitute and a sailor, the old man
what a blasphemy, the female who quarrels,
the dragon who sits at the shop
of the fryer,
the tumultuous girl gone mad
love,
they are all creatures of life
and pain;
the Lord is stirred in them, as in me.
Here I feel humble in company
my thoughts become
purer where the way is uglier.
“Cittavecchia” Umberto Saba
Behind the Roman Theater, in the heart of the Old Town district, following the slope of the Colle di San Giusto, there is one of the oldest streets in Trieste “Via Donota” considered as the road that connected Aquileia with the central part of the ancient Tergeste, on the extension of the Cardo maximus.
In the Middle Ages at the entrance to the road stood the Torre-Porta Donota, a crenellated tower with a square plan, equipped with a drawbridge and a moat full of water, built to defend one of the main entrances within the city walls and to the castle of San Giusto. After the urban development of the nineteenth century, the original facade of the gate was no longer visible because it was covered by a modern building and Piazza Donota was built in the space in front, characterized by the construction of new buildings.
From 1981 to 1986 during some building renovation works, part of the medieval structures of the Tower were found but also Roman ruins, a building dating back to the 1st century, graves from the 4th century and other burials and amphorae, all carefully preserved in the Antiquarium in via Donota, opened by the Superintendency on 14 December 1985 and located on the corner of via Donota and via Battaglia.
In the Androna degli Scalini that connects via del Teatro Romano and via Donota, there was a public wash house that worked until 1936.
At the corner of via Donota and via del Crocefisso there is a shrine called “Pontal de Cristo”, hence the name of the street. The original perhaps of medieval origin was destroyed by fire in 1931 and replaced by a first that was stolen on 23 December 1980 together with the crown above and, then, by a second made by the sculptor Renzo Possenelli.
The building in Via Donota at no. 16 stands on a pre-existence of medieval origin as confirmed by the excavations conducted in 1982 which made it possible to identify the original masonry, consisting of well-squared sandstone blocks but also to discover fragments of tiles, yellow and red plaster and parts of mosaic tiles black, which testify to the presence of ancient houses.
On the main facade of the building there is a medieval mullioned window with arches in Istrian stone, with a slender central column and a capital in the shape of a truncated and overturned quadrangular pyramid. Another window, of which only a few traces remain, opens at the left corner of the elevation.
Via Donota was one of the main streets of the city full of shops and inhabited by many sea workers.
In this street the Ploner brothers created a new accordion keyboard, called Trieste-style, in their musical instrument workshop, which achieved great success between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s.