The City of the Music and Theatre
Trieste boasts an established tradition in music in general, but equally
long-standing is its passion for all types of theatre production, confirmed
every year by the remarkable number of tickets sold in proportion to the
population. Many public and private institutions organise programmes of
concerts and performances in the city's theatres, churches, museums and
other venues, some of which are open-air. The main center of production is
the Fondazione Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi, which stages performances in
the splendid Verdi Theatre and the smaller Sala Tripcovich. In two centuries
of history the Teatro Nuovo, opened on April 21st 1801 with Giovanni Simone
Mayr's opera Ginevra di Scozia and subsequently renamed the Teatro Grande,
has played host, among other things, to the premieres of Giuseppe Verdi's
operas Il Corsaro and Stiffelio, in 1848 and 1850 respectively.
A few days after Verdi's death in 1901 the local
authorities decided to rename the theatre after him, making it the first in
the world to be so named. The Fondazione Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi, which
comprises a symphony orchestra, choir, corps de ballet and chamber music
groups, now offers a wide range of operas, light operas, ballets and
symphonic and chamber music concerts. The opera and ballet season lasts from
November to May, presenting eight operas and three classical and modern
ballet productions. From mid-June to mid-August the Fondazione holds the
International Festival of Light Opera. The only one of its kind in Italy, it
takes pride of pace in the Fondazione and the city alike. The works staged
are Viennese, Italian, French and Spanish. The symphonic seasons, in May,
September and October, present double performances of ten or so concerts
featuring internationally renowned conductors and soloists. Sunday mornings
also feature “aperitif” concerts with the Theatre's instrumental groups or
other chamber music ensembles. Another important musical institution is the
Societè dei Concerti, a private non-profit-making body in activity for over
70 years which organises chamber music recitals from November to April
evenings at the Politeama Rossetti.
Chamber music concerts are also staged at the Auditorium
of the Museo Revoltella, where at the various times of the year a number of
bodies organise short seasons mainly featuring young concert artists and
international prizewinning musicians. Devotional music is presented by the
Cappella Civica in San Giusto Cathedral during Sunday mass and on other
Catholic festivities. The Cappella also organises concerts during Advent and
Lent, and in September assists in the organisation of an organ music
festival. In no way does Trieste neglect contemporary music. Every November
the Associazione “Musica Libera” organises the Festival Luigi Nono. And an
important contribution to the city's music scene is the free summer evening
concerts performed by the woodwinds of the Civica Orchestra di Fiati outside
the Harbourmaster's Office on the seafront, in addition to their annual
concert of January 6th. A chamber music season is also offerede by the
Slovene Music School, the Glasbena Matica, presenting a selection of
musicians from Slav countries. Concerts by many Italian singer-songwriters
are held at the Politeama Rossetti and the Sala Tripcovich, as well as in
the capacious venues of the Palazzo dello Sport and the Nereo Rocco football
stadium.
The Teatro Miela acts as a special venue for alternative types of music: electronic, ethnic,
funky, jazz, mystic, pop, tribal – the most eclectic and innovative forms
performed by musicians from all over the world. A rich selection of drama is
also produced by the city's three public theatre companies. The Teatro
Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia (Repertory Theatre), based at the
Politeama Rossetti, plays host between October and May to a varied selection
of its own and guest productions, with works ranging from the great Greek
classics to 20th-century plays, in addition to musicals, modern dance and
the big spectacles of the new musical theatre. Interesting contemporary
drama productions are also performed in the compact spaces of the new Sala
Bartoli. The Repertory company of the Teatro Stabile la Contrada, based at
the Teatro Cristallo, specialises in comedy theatre, with a number of
productions in local dialect. The Slovene Repertory Theatre – Slovensko
Stalno Gledalisce, founded in 1903 – is part of the Offspring Project, an
association of European minority theatres. From December to April it
presents a varied programme of drama productions, acted for the most part in
Slovene. Every summer the Roman amphitheatre,
a number of squares, the waterfront and other city spaces are transformed
into new stages of various sizes for the presentation of all kinds of music,
theatre and dance productions ranging from the most traditional and popular
to the alternative and avant-garde.
The City of Books
Twentieth-century Trieste produced writers and poets of international
standing and renown. A series of circumstances made the city a special
vantage point for the observation and analysis of the problems of
contemporary amn – his losses and his torments- and their consequent
translation into psycological sensitivity and poetic expression. Trieste has
always generated individuals in search of their raison d'etre. Here,
identity has to constructed personally because the one an individual is born
with does not include the certainty of belonging to a territory with its own
rules and traditions. Scipio Slataper, the brevity of whose life deprived
the city of a crystalline intellect, as well as a writer who had pinpointed
the peculiarities of his birthplace, wrote, “Trieste is a place of
transition – geographical, historical, cultural and commercial – that is to
say a place of struggle.
Everything in Trieste is dual or triple, starting with
the flora and finishing with ethnicity”. Analytical and introspective
research run through the work of Svevo and Saba alike. The very names of
these writers make up a sort of manifesto. Italo Svevo was the nom de plume
of Ettore Schmitz, a Jew of German origin who chose a name that would
reflect his belonging to two cultures (“Svevo” is the Italian for “Schwabian”).
Umberto Saba, son of Ugo abramo Poli and Rachele Coen, decided on a
pseudonym in honour of his beloved nursemaid Beppa Sabaz. Scipio is a most
italian – in fact a Latin – name which went with the Slovene surname
Slataper. None of them was well received by the critics of the time – they
were different from their Italian contemporaries in terms of both content
and form. They all had to wait for domestic recognition. Italo Svevo was
born in Trieste on December 19th 1861 and died following a road accident on
September 13th 1928. He gained critical acclaim abroad before being accepted
in Italy, partly as a result of the “spurious” quality of his language,
which made the limpidity of his narrative difficult to appreciate. Only well
after publication did A life, Senility and
The Conscience of Zeno, to name only the most successful
of his works, find the place they deserve in the 20th-century literary
firmament. Scipio Slataper was born in Trieste on July 14th 1888 and died on
December 3rd 1915 on the Italian front line at Podgora. His My Carso
analyses Trieste's relationship with its Slovene hinterland and the cultural
peculiarities deriving from it. Umberto Saba was born in Trieste on March
9th 1883 and died in Gorizia on August 25th 1957. His poetry, whose finest
expressions is Il Canzoniere, draws heavily on his own life experience in
the formulation of an introspection which verges on psychoanalysis. The
baton of this analysis, and an awareness that a configuration of
ungovernably changing factors may always call human destiny into question,
especially for a border people, was taken up in the second half of the
century by Fulvio Tomizza, who died in Trieste in 1999. He was born on
January 26th 1935 in Materada, in Istria – once Austrian, then Italian,
subsequently Yugoslav and now in Croatia. He brought his lucid awareness to
the torment of the people who have lived in these lands. Materada, The Girl
from Petrovia and The Acacia Wood, indeed his work as a whole, stand as an
attempt to find dialogue going beyond ethnic, social and politi cal
differences.
Civic Museums
The Civic Museums of Trieste are made up of a series of museums of different
types, conserving records of local history and culture. With documents
telling of the city's past, objects which belonged to far-sighted
collectors, exemplifying the tastes and styles of an epoch, architectural
constructions bearing witness to particular historical moments and the
popular imagination of an age, together they stand as an important body of
material for acquiring a knowledge of the city. The Civic Museum of
History and Art is located in Via della Cattedrale. Established in
the 19th century with the aim of collecting local historical and cultural
material, it houses archaeological objects from prehistoric and
protohistoric times, an Egyptian collection, a collection of Greek vases and
rooms given over to Ancient Rome.
Annexed to the Museum is the Stone Monument
Garden, whose natural greenery is an ideal setting for the cultural
events held there on summer evenings. It houses Roman epigraphs, monuments
and sculptures and a tiny neo-Classical temple with a cenotaph dedicated to
Winckelmann. The Captain's Garden conserves medieval and modern sculptures,
plinths and inscriptions. In the nearby Castle of San Giusto is the Castle Civic Museum, housing a rich display of weapons obtained
from private collections in the early 20th century. In the restored interior
of the Lalio Bastion, April 4th 2001 saw the opening of the new Lapidario
Tergestino, containing inscriptions, sculptures, bas-reliefs and
architectural remains from Roman times. Since 1930 the Castle has been owned
by the City Council, which has fitted it out as a tourist attraction and
uses it for cultural events, shows and exhibitions. The Castle occupies a
particularly privileged position from a panoramic point of view. The hill on
which it stands gives a fine all-round view of the city and the surrounding
area.
The Sartorio Civic Museum and the Morpurgo Civic Museum are named after prestigious local
families who left their homes and furnishings to the City Council, which
uses them to present images of the daily life of the hold Triestine
bourgeoisie. The Sartorio is located in the 18th-century villa belonging to
the family, which originally hailed from San Remo. On the first floor the
entire interior design of the house is conserved intact: furniture,
pictures, drawings, books, rugs, ornaments and other objects. The second
floor houses a precious collection of drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo.
There is also the Rusconi-Opuich Collection – about 2.500 pieces: paintings,
drawings, prints, jewellery, fans, fabrics, objects in silver and pewter –
and the Stavropulos Art Collection. A Greek-born captain of industry,
collector and patron of the arts who lived in Trieste and Budapest, Socrates
Stavropulos donated to the city his collection of paintings and sculptures
ranging from antiquity to the 20th century. The Sartorio also boasts a
collection of 18th-century Italian majolica, presented together with
specimens of local and English production. The Morpurgo is sited in the
apartment of a rich 19th-century family prominent in the local
entrepeneurial class. Located on the second floor of a building in Via
Imbriani designed in 1875 by Giovanni Berlam, it was bequeathed to the City
Council in 1943 by Mario Morpurgo de Nilma, a refined collector.
It is a magnificent example of a sumptuous bourgeois
residence; the interior spaces, all original, represent a range of styles
typical of the second half of the 19th century. On the first floor of the
same building is the Carlo Schmidl Foundation Theatrical Museum,
formed from the legacy left by the music publisher after which it is named
and supplemente by the archives of the Teatro Verdi and a number of other
19th- and 20th- century theatres and theatre companies. In terms of the
documents and publications contained in it, in Italy it is secobd only to
the museum of La Scala in Milan. It bears witness to the musical life of
Trieste and its theatres from 1801 the present day with posters, programmes,
photographs, prints, medals, pictures, drawings, designs, musical
instruments, memorabilia, archive material and signed manuscripts.
A wealth of material is also contained in the specialised
music and entertainment library, and the photograph and media libraries. The
same building also houses the Civic Museum of Homeland History, which
conserves documents, relics, paintings and prints telling of local folklore.
In Piazza Oberdan is the Museum of the Risorgimento, housed
in a purpose-built construction designed by Umberto Nordio in 1934 and
decorated with frescoes by Carlo Sbiso'. It displays documents, photographs,
uniforms, memorabilia and paintings related to the events and people who
shaped the local Risorgimento, from the upheavals of 1848 to the First World
War. On the building's exterior is a memorial chapel dedictaed to Guglielmo
Oberdan (a Triestine patriot hanged for an attempt on the life of Emperor
Franz Josef in 1882) with a martyr's cell and a monument sculpted by Attilio
Selva.
Commemorating the tragic events of the Second World War
is the Risiera di San Sabba, a rice-husking factory used after September
1943 as a prison, a transit camp for deportees destined for Germany and
Poland, a depot for confiscated property and a detention and death campo of
hostages, partisans, political prisoners and Jews. On April 4th 1944 it was
fitted with a working gas oven.
In 1965 the Risiera was declared a National Monument by
Decree of the President of the Republic and ten years later was rebuilt to a
plan by Romano Boico, so becoming the Civic Museum of the Risiera di
San Sabba. Also in the chain of city museums is the Diego
de Henriquez Civic Museum of War for Peace, based on the collection
of the Triestine scholar (1909-1974) after whom it is named. In addition to
the ordnance and light arms on display is a huge library and a military,
civilian and cartographic archive. It also has sections specialising in
telecommunications, sound reproduction, seals, philately, military uniforms
and headgear, prints, pictures and medals and a particularly broad-ranging
photographic archive.
The recently opened Civic Museum of Oriental Art is the
first in Friuli Venezia Giulia specifically devoted to this subject. Its
collections and objects include Chinese and Japanese porcelain, a rich
collection of Japanese silographs, travel memoirs, weapons, musical
instruments and ethno-anthropological articles from all over the Asian
continent, especially, China and Japan. Also part of the Civic Museum
network is the Mitteleuropa Post and Telegraph Museum,
opened in 1997 in the central Post Office building (designed by F. Setz). It
displays records of the “postal culture” of the Region and the neighbouring
countries in the central European area.
The Revoltella Museum
The Revoltella Museum is a major art gallery brought into
being by the development of an institute founded in 1872 at the behest of
Baron Pasquale Revoltella (1795-1869), who left his home and art collection
to the city of Trieste in his Will.
Together with the building and its contents, he endowed
the museum with a substantial income which enabled his legacy to be built up
as the years passed, thus producing a noteworthy art collection in a
relatively short time. By the end of the 19th century is comprised the work
of celebrated Italian painters such as Hayez, Morelli, Favretto, Nono and
Palizzi, in addition to that of many foreign artists. Over the last century
the Museum has enjoyed further development, becoming a cultural institution
of ever-increasing prestige and a major reference point for modern and
contemporary art.
Not only does it boast the biggest names in 20th-century
Italian art, including Casorati, Sironi, Carra', Morandi, De Chirico, Manzù,
Marini, Fontana and Burri, it has staged a series of exhibitions whose
top-level academic content has made a significant contribution to enhancing
appreciation of the art of the last two centuries. The Museum has also been
able to axpand through the purchase of the nearby Palazzo Brunner, which was
thoroughly restructured between 1968 and 1991 (the realisation of Carlo
Scarpa's design underwent several suspensions) to give it new facilities for
the exhibition of modern art.
The Revoltella now occupies a huge complex of three
buildings making up an entire block bounded by Piazza Venezia, Via Diaz, Via
Cadorna and Via San Giorgio. The third building – Palazzina Basevi, whose
entrance is on Via San Giorgio – houses the Museum's management and
administrative offices. Palazzo Revoltella, built in 1858 to a design by
Friedrich Hitzig and lived in by Pasquale Revoltella until his death in
1869, has three floors joined by a huge spiral staircase, and conserves
almost all the original furnishings and works of the Revoltella collection.
The second floor gives access to the gallery of modern art, which displays a
selection of over 200 19th- and 20th-century paintings.
The City of Science
Modern-day Trieste may be said to be a fullblown scientific capital. In the
period following the Second World War a concerted effort was made to launch
the city as an important center for the production of scientific knowledge
for the benefit of developing countries but also, and significantly, the
countries of central and eastern Europe. Starting from the premise that the
most advanced science was essential to bring the Third World out of
underdevelopment, in 1964 the International center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
was founded under the directorship of Professor Abdus Salam, a Pakistani who
15 years later was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
The center is supported by two UN agencies, the
International Atomic Energy Agency and UNESCO, but the bulk of its financing
is provided by the Italian government. It has contributed to the advanced
training of about 60.000 scientists, most of whom are from developing
countries. Subsequent years saw the foundation of the International High
School for Advanced Studies (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi
Avanzati – SISSA), providing Englishtaught doctorate courses with an
international staff and student body which has earned itself a reputation
for scientific excellence.
The great strides made in molecular genetics in the 1970s
led to the idea of establishing a center of excellence for research and
training in genetic engineering and biotechnology with the aim of tackling
the main problems besetting the Third World (food, health and economic
development).
The International center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB)
thus came into being in 1987. It is an autonomous international body whose
head office and one of two laboratories are in Trieste (the other laboratory
is in New Delhi).
This center, also financed mainly by the Italian
government, plays host to 150 researchers and is another body to have earned
a reputation for the quality of its scintific work. In the same years the
Italian government also decided on Trieste as the location for a new
national Synchrotron Light Laboratory dedicated to the production ox X-rays
for the study of material structures and biomolecules. The founder and first
President of ELETTRA, as it is now called, was Professor Carlo Rubbia, who
also won a Nobel Prize for Physics in that period.
Together with the ICGEB and a range of other research
bodies, ELETTRA is located in the AREA Science Park, the biggest facility of
its kind in Italy. The local scientific panorama is completed by a range of
long-established such as the University, the Astronomical Observatory of the
National Institute of Astrophysics, the National Institute and Experimental
Geophysics, the National Research Council Institute of Marine Science, the
Marine Biology Laboratory and the interactive museum facility named Science center – Immaginario Scientifico. This complex
of research institutions, some of which enojy great international standing,
give Trieste the well-earned reputation as a capital of science.
Texts courtesy of AIAT Trieste
Photos are property of "Archivio Generale of Comune di Trieste"
