History

Max Fabiani was born near San Daniele del Carso (Kobdilj, in present-day Slovenia) in 1865, trained at the Vienna Polytechnic, and went on to work as an assistant to Otto Wagner — the architect who defined the Viennese Secession’s built language of rational geometry and organic ornament. When the Bartoli family commissioned a new commercial building on Piazza della Borsa, they turned to Fabiani at a moment when Trieste, then the Habsburg Empire’s main Adriatic port, was hungry for modern prestige architecture. The result, completed in 1906, would become the building most often cited as the finest example of the Secession style in the city.

The building’s program was emphatically mixed-use. The lower three floors housed the depot of Antonio Bartoli & Figlio, a manufacturing merchant house whose name the building still carries, along with street-level shops. The glazed winter-garden verandah on the third floor accommodated a kosher restaurant that served Trieste’s substantial Jewish community, its glass walls allowing diners to look out across the busy square below. Upper floors provided residential apartments typical of the era’s bourgeois demand for urban living.

Through the 1930s the building’s commercial tenants shifted as Trieste’s economic position changed under Italian sovereignty. The original entrance, positioned on the left flank of the facade, was relocated to a side wall during this period, with a shop occupying the old opening. The political turbulence of the mid-twentieth century left the building physically intact; by the postwar decades it had settled into a quiet rhythm of retail and residential tenancy.

Today Casa Bartoli remains in mixed residential and commercial use. The building’s prominence on Piazza della Borsa, directly beside the Borsa Vecchia (the former stock exchange), ensures it remains a daily reference point for residents and visitors alike, its acanthus cascades as vivid today as they were at the building’s inauguration.