History

When Romeo Depaoli drew up the plans for Casa Terni-Smolars in 1906, Trieste was an imperial port city at the crossroads of Italian, Central European, and Adriatic cultures — and its architecture reflected every tension of that position. The Austro-Hungarian administration had transformed the Borgo Teresiano quarter into an orderly grid of bourgeois palaces, and the Liberty movement had arrived just in time to clothe those palaces in exuberant ornament before the empire collapsed.

Depaoli was born in Trieste in 1876 and trained at the city’s technical school for arts and trades before completing his studies at the Vienna Polytechnic. That dual formation shaped everything he built: a structural classicism learned in Vienna, draped in the lush vegetative ornament then radiating outward from Milan and Turin. By 1904, working through the firm Piccin & Depaoli, he had developed what critics later called a distinctive “Depaoli vocabulary” — chiaroscuro reliefs, writhing plant forms, and facades that read as sculptural compositions rather than decorated surfaces.

Casa Terni-Smolars was commissioned by the Terni family, members of the city’s commercial bourgeoisie, and represents Depaoli’s mature period alongside Casa Polacco (1908). The building occupies a corner plot where Via Dante Alighieri meets Via Mazzini and extends toward Via San Nicolò, allowing Depaoli to deploy his decorative programme across multiple elevations and exploit the corner turn as a compositional device. The sculptural reliefs on the facade are attributed to the sculptor Romeo Rathmann, adding a figurative dimension to the floral ornament.

Depaoli died young — in January 1916, aged thirty-nine, following a prolonged illness — leaving a body of work concentrated in a single decade. Casa Terni-Smolars survived the twentieth century intact and stands today as a protected example of Triestine Liberty, a style that briefly reconciled the peninsula’s artistic innovations with the gravity of an empire on the edge of dissolution.