Triest: Gateway to the Eastern Mediterranean

In 1863 Triest was part of the Habsburg Empire and had been since 1382. Trieste (as known today) is now part of Italy, with Slovenia only a few miles to the north and Croatia around 30 miles to the east. It is a city surrounding a massive port – not unlike Salonica / Thessaloniki – and stretches up into the hills. Catholic Churches mix with with Orthodox as the city is approached on bus (the way I came) from Venice airport. The alps are glimpsed to the north all the way until we plunged down to the Riviera, where a sparkling light blue sea contrasted with the steep greyish cliffs the other side.

Mary Severn Newton, her husband Charles Thomas Newton and Gertrude Jekyll took a steamer from Triest on 20 October to Corfu. They had travelled from London for the past week via Paris, Munich, Vienna – stopping at museums as they went – then over the Semmering Pass in the Alps to the major Port. They arrived by train at the station from which I am leaving for Venice shortly. At that time, Trieste was the maritime gateway to Greece, the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean; and for those from the East coming to the West.

Until the coming of the railways in the mid nineteenth century, it was often easier to travel around Italy by boat than go overland. This is why the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (born in Stendhal 1717) was in the city in July 1768. Commonly known as the ‘father of art history’ or classical archaeology, Winckelmann was travelling back from Vienna to Rome, where he was based at the Vatican and had made his name observing Greek / Roman sculpture intricately as well as writing on the expertise of the Ancient Greeks in art. He was staying under assumed name and had a male guest – Francesco Arcangeli – visit him several nights in a row, almost certainly for sex. On 18 July Arcangeli murdered Winckelmann for some precious medals and the art historian died from stab wounds. He forgave his murderer, but Archangeli was tried, found guilty and sentenced to be ‘beaten alive on a wheel’. Both deaths are horrific.

In 1833 the city funded and commissioned a neo-classical monument to Winckelmann. By this time Winckelmann’s radicalism in pronouncing Greek art as superior to Roman and all else for naturalism and drawing from life was a given. Triest had also been a place where many Northern European philhellenes sailed to fight in the Greek War of Independence and Greek refugees came in the other direction in the 1820s. Winckelmann’s monument at the time the Newtons and Jekyll visited was in the Orto Lapiderium, near the Cathedral, but was moved in 1935 to where it is now. The neo-classical sculptor Canova approved the designs the sculpture, which is of a Antinous type beautiful young man in the position of the Dying Gaul with wings sprouting from his back. It is a bit camp but very apt given Winckelmann’s adoring writing of that sort of figure. Around the base is a frieze of Winchelmann with the adoring arts (all women) coming towards him. I like to think the party of 1863 may have visited it.

In any case, Triest was the setting for their first venture to the Eastern Mediterranean. The deep-water port is divided into passenger and cargo, with the latter stretching around to the East. Surrounding the Port are grandiose buildings, a mmixture of palaces, customs houses and presumably embassies. The light last night was beautiful and though it was cold, the sun was warming and at dusk it melted from yellow to orange to pinkish red vanishing in the light blue sea.

Gertrude Jekyll recorded as they left on 20 October that:

Our steamer is an Austrian Lloyd, carrying a good many English passengers. The sea quite calm and a hot sun. A beautiful young girl, consumptive, laid on the deck on a mattress with cushions. I sat on the top of the deck-house doing a drawing, and talked to the captain. The first officer, a Triestine, with many apologies, asked if I would make a slight portrait sketch of him to give to his family. When it was done I invited him to write his name in my sketch-book but he said unfortunately he could not write, but he would spell it - Giuseppe Martinolich. A number of Venetian fishing-boats with painted sails lay becalmed. (Jekyll 1935, 41)