Liberty Trieste

Italian Liberty in Trieste reads more like Vienna’s Secession than Milan’s Sommaruga. The city was Austrian until 1918, the empire’s principal seaport, and the architects who built its 1900–1914 façades trained in Vienna under Otto Wagner. Max Fabiani (1865–1962), the Slovenian-Italian architect from Kobdilj near Gorizia, joined Wagner’s atelier on personal invitation and stayed until the end of the century. He returned to Trieste fluent in the same vocabulary that produced the Secession Building and the Postsparkasse.

The chapter that follows is shorter than Turin and denser than Venice. Trieste’s Liberty inventory is concentrated in roughly twelve square blocks between Piazza della Borsa, Borgo Teresiano and the Canal Grande, and the language is unmistakably Mitteleuropean. Fabiani’s Casa Bartoli of 1905 is closer to Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Mathildenhöhe than to anything Sommaruga built in Milan. Romeo Depaoli, Giorgio Zaninovich and Giacomo Zammattio — the Trieste-based Vienna-trained generation — produced Casa Terni-Smolars, Casa Polacco and Palazzo Dettelbach in the same key. Even Giuseppe Sommaruga himself, when he came north to build Palazzo Viviani-Giberti in 1907, adapted to the local register.