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”.

MUSEO SARTORIO – DIMORA STORICA -TRIESTE

Villa Sartorio, an elegant bourgeois villa located a short distance from the sea and surrounded by a large garden, was built in the 1700s and modified and enlarged in the neoclassical era.the owner Pietro Sartorio, who arrived in Trieste from his native Sanremo in 1775, as a merchant of grains, became part of the Triestine aristocracy, starting a thriving commercial activity, which was then successfully taken over by his sons Giovanni Guglielmo and Pietro.
The latter marries the rich and cultured Giuseppina Fontana and with her becomes the owner of this villa, which he furnishes with valuable furniture and paintings, still on display. He passed on his taste for art to his children, in particular to Giuseppe who became an attentive and competent collector, to whom we owe the rare collection of 254 drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo, one of the most important in the world.

The library, divided into three rooms, exhibits the nineteenth-century bookcases that preserve about six thousand volumes of American literature of the eighteenth-nineteenth century and classical literature, among them a rare section of eighteenth-century Masonic works. At the center of the second library you can admire the two terrestrial and celestial globes by Wilhelm Janszoon Blaeu, dated around 1600, the official cosmographer of the Dutch States General. The exhibition room preserves the Venetian terrazzo floor intact, a couple of small bookcases and a valuable inlaid 18th century chest of drawers.

The rooms are full of paintings, paintings and drawings that have as their subject views of Italian and European cities, markets and architecture of nineteenth-century Venice.
At the ancient stables of Villa Sartorio there is the plaster cast-glyptotheque of the Civic Museums of History and Art, set up in a dedicated space of 130 square meters. A rich sculptural collection: more than 500 pieces, from the late nineteenth century to today, and the oldest examples in the collection are four casts of works by Antonio Canova, made by the artist himself.

In the basement you can visit a beautiful section dedicated to ceramics, about two hundred and fifty pieces, which covers a very long period of time, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The tableware on display comes from the most important Italian manufacturers and ends with examples of English production and seventy notable examples of Trieste ceramics from the last three decades of the eighteenth century.

Villa Sartorio became a “house museum” in 1947 thanks to the bequest of Anna Segrè Sartorio. Inside the furnishings, works of art and everyday objects coexist styles: Empire as the central hall dedicated to receptions and dances and adorned with consoles and mirrors or the music room with the piano and a series of Empire furniture including an elegant dormeuse or the Bedroom of the Duke (in 1919 it hosted Emanuele Filiberto Duca D’Aosta) with a gallery of valuable 17th-18th century paintings of sacred subjects; Neorococò the pink living room furnished with furniture inlaid with floral motifs;

Biedermeier, like the dining room with the table set and, on the sideboard-plate, the precious Meissen porcelain service, a gift from the King of Saxony Frederick Augustus II; Neo-Gothic like the Gothic Hall with its uniform decoration from floor to ceiling to furniture and reflects the adherence to the fashion of the recovery of historical styles that spread in the mid-19th century.

In a particular room there is the precious Triptych of Santa Chiara, an exceptional testimony of Venetian painting of the first half of the fourteenth century, a work of art executed in tempera on wood. Panels depict on a gold background episodes from the life of Christ, the death of Santa Chiara and the stigmata of San Francesco. With the triptych closed, St. Christopher is depicted on the left wing, and St. Sergius on the right, with the Trieste halberd in his hand.

The park was built in 1807 by Pietro Sartorio who made the area look like a Venetian garden with a portal, a monumental staircase, some statues and a gloriette that was used as a pavilion for music. The statues that adorn the garden today represent one of the very few examples of early eighteenth-century outdoor sculpture in Trieste.