PARK OF THE CASTLE OF MIRAMARE -TRIESTE
The Castle is surrounded by a large park of about 22 hectares.
Inside the park, Massimiliano built the small “Gartenhaus” also called Castelletto, as it recalls the exterior of the Miramare Castle. It overlooks the small port of Grignano and was inhabited by the spouses until their apartments inside the Castle were finished.
After Massimiliano’s death in the Castelletto under medical supervision, Carlotta retired showing the first signs of mental imbalance.
In addition to the Miramare Castle, Carl Junker also designed the Park and the work was entrusted in 1857 to the court gardener Josef Laube, subsequently replaced by the Bohemian Anton Jelinek. The Archduke himself defined which plants should be planted and brought 820 species of plants from nurseries and villas of Veneto,
subsequently numerous tree typologies arrived from the imperial greenhouses of Vienna of the Habsburg family, while the more exotic ones were imported following the circumnavigation of the globe with the frigate Novara.
In the park there are sculptures from the Berlin school Moritz Geiss, the greenhouses, the Swan lake, the cannons donated by Leopoldo I, king of the Belgians and the chapel of San Canciano.
Like a silent sentinel, a Ptolemaic sphinx dating back to the 2nd century BC. C., carved in pink granite, is located at the top of the quay of the Castle’s harbor. It is a precious artefact belonging to the Egyptian collection brought together by Maximilian thanks to the scientific advice of Egyptologist Simon Reinisch, and now preserved in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
MUSEUM OF ORIENTAL ART – TRIESTE
At the beginning of Cavana, the Museum of Oriental Art is housed in a historic 18th century building, the Palazzetto Leo, which dates back to 1747 and built by the architect Giovanni Fusconi.
The Leos had settled in Trieste in 1155 and in the 1600s they became barons of the Holy Roman Empire. Between 1772 and 1773 it hosted Giacomo Casanova. Pietro Leo de Loewensberg died in 1814 and the family became extinct. At the beginning of the 20th century, Count Laval Nugent, heir to Baron de Zanchi, already owner of the second and third floors, bought the whole building and in 1954 it was donated to the Municipality of Trieste.
The Museum of Oriental Art was inaugurated on March 8, 2001 and houses collections of oriental art, travel memories, weapons, musical instruments and various kinds of artifacts from all over the Asian area, in particular the story of relations between Trieste and the East through the Suez Canal started in the 18th century, the interesting nucleus of Gandhara sculptures, embroidered Chinese silk fabrics,
porcelain from the Song period,
sculptures and objects related to Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism,
Japanese porcelain, collection of Ukiyo-e prints, works by great masters of Japanese art including Hiroshige and Hokusai with the famous Wave.
MORPURGO MUSEUM – TRIESTE
It is the apartment of a rich family of the Trieste entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of the 1800s who collected works of art and precious furnishings with refined taste.
The house represents a wonderful example of the princely style and opulence that characterized the families of the Trieste upper middle class.
In 1870 the sisters Emma and Fanny Mondolfo, married to the Morpurgo brothers, bought the building with number 839, now via Imbriani 5, and the adjacent one number 840, now via Mazzini 42. These ancient buildings were demolished, in 1875 the architect Giovanni Berlam designed a palace of elegant and sober neo-Renaissance forms. Giacomo and Fanny Morpurgo with their children Mario and Matilde,
in 1878, went to occupy the apartment located on the entire second floor, while Carlo Marco and Emma Morpurgo chose the one corresponding to the first floor
On Emma’s death the house passed entirely to her sister, who in 1938 made a deed of donation in favor of the children. Upon their death, both left their respective properties to the Municipality of Trieste. Mario Morpurgo in his will, drawn up in 1941, assigned the Municipality of Trieste as the heir of all its substance, in addition to the art collections, all the furniture and furnishings and all his assets were destined to create an intangible fund with the name Mario Morpurgo de Nilma. The still existing foundation aims to help needy people, with preference for those who have fallen, born and resident in Trieste.
The apartment on the second floor, with its furniture almost intact, became the Morpurgo Civic Museum and the one on the first floor was in 1950 used as a Museum of the Risorgimento and that of the History of the Homeland. A precious collection of eighteenth-century majolica,
vases from Savona, majolica from Faenza and Castelli l’Abruzzo, Japanese tableware, Bohemian glass and complete table sets in French Pillivuit porcelain with monogram, woodcuts and engravings by great artists such as Jacques Callot, Gérard Edelink, Pierre Drevet, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Francesco Bartolozzi, Jean Balvay, Max Klinger and Félix Vallotton and the gallery of sixty pictures, drawings and paintings
among these the oldest ones executed by artists from Luca Giordano’s circle, make the visit an experience unique life of a bourgeois family of the 1800s
PALAZZO TERGESTEO -TRIESTE
Palazzo Tergesteo is a few steps from Piazza Borsa and Piazza Unità. Palazzo Tergesteo was built on the site of the Dogana Vecchia on the initiative of a group of shareholders, the “Società del Tergesteo”.
It was built in just two years on a project by the architect Francesco Bruyne and inaugurated on the evening of August 24, 1842. It cost about two million Austrian lire and was one of the last palaces in Trieste built in the neoclassical style. The building is spread over four floors above ground in addition to the ground floor and mezzanine and consists of four buildings separated by a gallery, located on the ground floor,
in the shape of a Greek cross and inspired by the Galleria de Cristoforis in Milan, covered gabled with metal frame.
The entrances to the building are located on the four sides of the building: there are four entrances to the gallery, two mirrored places, one main on Piazza della Borsa, and one on Piazza Verdi, and two others on via del Teatro and via Einaudi.
The two marble sculptural groups that dominate the main facades were added later. The one on the facade facing Piazza della Borsa, by Pietro Zandomeneghi, depicts the goddess of the sea Tethys, standing on a shell pulled by four horses and holding a baby in her arms and on the right Mercury, god of commerce. The sculpture represents the city of Trieste driven by the fortunes that come from the sea, but also from trade and the nascent industry.
The second sculptural group on the rear facade towards the Verdi Theater, by Antonio Bianchi, represents Neptune and Mercury with allegories of geography and history.
Il palazzo fu sede della Borsa triestina dal 1844 al 1928 e del Lloyd Austriaco dal 1857 al 1883 e divenne il luogo più rappresentativo di commercio e di ritrovo della Trieste ottocentesca.
Many famous people frequent the Tergesteo including the Trieste writer Italo Svevo, who used the gallery as a background for his novel, “Zeno’s Consciousness”.
During the Second World War and the years of the occupation the Palace suffered numerous damages and in 1957 the architect Alessandro Psacaropulo intervened on the gallery, replacing the original sloping roof with a glass-concrete structure. In 2009, careful restoration work brought the Tergesteo Palace back to the splendor of the Habsburg era and the heart of the intervention was the reconstruction of the Gallery in its original nineteenth-century version.
Inside the Gallery, an original wall clock, not working, marks the time and day when the deed of incorporation of the Tergesteo Joint-Stock Company was signed and from 1863.
Towards Piazza Verdi there was Caffè Tergesteo, one of the historic cafes of Trieste, characterized by stained glass windows depicting episodes from Trieste’s history, a meeting place for the cultural elite of the time and also very popular with the Trieste poet Umberto Saba. “Caffè Tergesteo … you reconcile the Italian and the Slavic, late at night, along your billiard table”.
REVOLTELLA MUSEUM -TRIESTE
The Revoltella Museum is located in a Neo-Renaissance building from 1858 and overlooks Piazza Venezia. It includes the private apartment of Baron Revoltella, owner of the palace of the same name, and the Brunner Palace which houses the Gallery of Modern Art on the third floor.
Pasquale Revoltella was born in Venice in 1795 and moved, as a child, with his family to Trieste. He became an important figure in the political and above all economic life of the city and contributed to the opening of the Suez Canal.He died unmarried in 1869 and donated with his will the Palazzo Revoltella with the Museum and the Chalet with the Revoltella Park, in the Ferdinandeo area. to the city of Trieste.
He died unmarried in 1869 and donated the Palazzo Revoltella with the Museum and the Chalet with the Revoltella Park, in the Ferdinandeo area, to the city of Trieste.
Each room of his private apartment, inside Palazzo Revoltella, was cared for in the smallest decorative and ornamental details.
Passionate about art and the taste for beauty, the baron enriched every room of the palace with works of art.
The dining room, the green living room, the blue living room, the yellow living room, the ballroom, the domed room and many other rooms each had distinct functions of representation and art.
The sculptural work “the Fountain of the Aurisina Nymph” (1858) by Pietro Magni welcomes visitors to Palazzo Revoltella and represents the construction of the second aqueduct in Trieste, a true technological jewel.
On the first floor “The cutting of the isthmus of Suez” (1863) by Pietro Magni, represents Europe that holds together, shaking hands, the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.
In addition to the works of the baron, the Municipality acquired numerous other works, paid for with the donations that Revoltella himself had made to the city. The works on display today are about 350 between paintings and sculptures.
Palazzo Brunner houses the works of Italian authors of the second half of the nineteenth century (third floor), the works acquired in the first decades of the twentieth century (fourth floor), the works of artists from Friuli-Venezia-Giulia (fifth floor) and national ( sixth) of the second half of the twentieth century.
The works on display are, among others, by artists such as Giovanni Fattori, Domenico Induno, Giuseppe de Nittis, Ignacio Zuloaga, Mario Sironi, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio De Chirico, Lucio Fontana, Manlio Rho, Mario De Luigi, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giacomo Manzù , Francesco Hayez, Alice Pscaropulo.