Trieste's Canal Grande and Borgo Teresiano
The Habsburg city on the water
In the heart of Trieste, a few steps from Piazza Unità, the Borgo Teresiano is the district built in the eighteenth century by order of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, after which it is named, on land reclaimed from the old salt pans, when Trieste, a free port since 1719, was growing rapidly into the great port of the Habsburg Empire. Its regular grid of straight streets, lined with elegant neoclassical palaces of merchants and shipowners, is crossed by the Canal Grande, a navigable canal dug between 1754 and 1756 to allow ships to unload their goods directly in front of the warehouses of the merchants. Today, small boats are moored along it, and its banks are lined with cafés and restaurants with outdoor tables.
At the end of the canal stands the large neoclassical church of Sant'Antonio Taumaturgo, with its columned portico, while along the bank rises the splendid Serbian Orthodox Church of San Spiridione, with blue domes and rich mosaics and icons, a testimony of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of Habsburg Trieste, where Italians, Germans, Slovenes, Greeks, Serbs, Jews and Armenians lived together. On the Ponte Rosso, the bridge that crosses the canal, stands a bronze statue of James Joyce, who lived in Trieste from 1904 to 1920 and wrote part of "Dubliners" and "Ulysses" here; a short walk away, another statue depicts the writer Italo Svevo. In the evening, the canal is a lively place for an aperitif.
Tip: have an aperitif along the canal; visit the Serbian Orthodox church, one of the most beautiful in Italy.
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