The salvos of cannon fire from ships anchored in the Trieste harbour reverberate in Piazza del Macello, now Piazza Libertà. A motley crowd of workers from the outskirts, bourgeois from the city centre and farmers from the Carso crowd the arches of the new railway station.
The chatter of the common people winds through the air, a spark of anticipation and excitement. When the hands of the pocket watches ticking in the pockets of the waiting bourgeoisie strike 10.30:XNUMX, a whistle pierces the air, followed by the flutter of a smokestack and the vaporous panting of an arriving train.
It is the first, historic, convoy to travel on the Vienna-Trieste Railway. The Emperor of Austria Franz Joseph, accompanied by the Empress Elisabeth, gets off the train amid the ovations of the crowd. Among the carriages of the entourage, equally honored by the notables and colleagues, the engineer Carlo Ghega, fresh from his appointment as Baronet for the (impossible) construction of the Simmering Railway, descends the steps. The Albanian profile of the Austrian citizen who had worked in Veneto turns to look at the train now stopped on the tracks of the last stretch Ljubljana-Trieste. His face, transfigured in marble, still resists in the abandoned bust in a corner of the current railway station. On the same 27 July 1857, over 160 years ago, Trieste celebrated the inauguration of the Aurisina aqueduct and the lighting of the gas lamps in via del Torrente, now via Carducci.
Today it is an anniversary forgotten, except by scholars of trains and railways; yet from a purely technical point of view the arrival of the first direct train to Vienna was the event that most influenced the history of the city during the nineteenth century.
Estimates, following the completion of the Vienna-Trieste railway, predicted an annual traffic of 200 thousand tons; in 1865, less than ten years after the construction of the Southern Railway and before the opening of the Suez Canal, the volume had reached one million tons per year. The 577 kilometers of the Southern Railway, despite the oppressive monopoly regime of the Southern runway, had brought such a flood of goods as to require the creation not of new warehouses, but of a real port district.
Un waterfront with warehouses and administration buildings, industries and service buildings, power plants and electrical power plants. A city within a city, innervated by a network of 40 kilometers of tracks and platforms, connected to the “pulsating” heart of the railway station.

Most call it the Old Port, others “Punto Franco Nuovo”, and still others with the original crasis “Punto Franco Vecchio”. In reality, in the nineteenth century it was known as the New Port and later the Commercial Transit Port. An anthology that clearly denounced the absolutely novel character of the new port area, which was to be established as a modern port, similar to Marseille, Hamburg and the great European ports.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, ports experienced a Copernican revolution linked to the inventions of the industrial era. Ships converted to steam engines and replaced wooden hulls with iron ones, drastically cutting travel times and costs for goods in the holds. Consequently, “humble” materials such as wood and grain, previously “snubbed” by ships, suddenly became of commercial interest, multiplying global trade a hundredfold, in line with the colonial race towards the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The port was therefore no longer just the place where sailing ships could moor and goods could be deposited for the emporium or travelling fairs, but the key hub of a transport system where speed and efficiency reigned supreme. The larger size of the hulls favored dredging and deep seabeds, which was to the advantage of Trieste; the continuous movement of goods required, in turn, steam and later hydraulic cranes, capable of rapidly relocating goods from ships; the same need to move products to where it was most convenient to sell/buy them required immediate proximity to the railway.
It is the paradigm of the modern port, focused on loading/unloading operations that Trieste is now trying to differentiate, for example through industrial (BAT) or scientific-technical (Saipem) activity. The construction of the modern port then required works to defend against storm surges (the breakwater, on the Marseille model); a system for lifting goods (the hydraulic cranes of the Hydrodynamic Power Station); railway systems (the Old Port still preserves an early twentieth-century workshop for the repair of local locomotives).

The planning phase began in June 1861, when the engineer Paulin Talabot, commissioned by the Meridionale, presented a first proposal for the new port to Franz Joseph. The engineer was already known in the port sector for having revolutionized, with the brothers Jules and Léon, and with the chief engineer for maritime construction and road works of Marseille H. Pascal, the port of Marseille. It should be noted in this regard that Marseille had been a free port since 1669, as had Trieste and Fiume. After a series of changes proposed by the Podestà and the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Talabot formulated a new plan in 1862 (The Trieste Harbour Project), which, modified by his colleague Pascal, was adopted by the Harbour Commission imperial on January 27, 1865.

The approved project involved the north-east harbour, from the Lazzaretto di Santa Teresa to the Molo del Sale, with the construction of 4 parallel piers and one oblique, protected by a breakwater with an external reef, the latter placed parallel to the line of the quay. The works first required the burial of the Lazzaretto Nuovo, and then proceeding with the construction of the new structures. The works, entrusted to the Compagnia delle ferrovie Meridionali, should have ended in 1873, but the works dragged on until 1891, due to the poor conditions of the ground, with continuous dredging and arrangement works.
The Port functioned in segments: as soon as an area was completed, it became part of the port ecosystem, immediately using the available square metres (and warehouses).
The works for the Marseille-style dam were completed in 1875 and between 1883 and 1884 a first nucleus of buildings was completed and put into operation (5, 8, 11, 12/a, 13a, 14). The works for piers 0-I-II were completed with the breakwater in 1875, pier III in 1879 and pier IV only in 1887 (!).
On April 10, 1880, the Port Authority was born, by will of the Municipality of Trieste and the Chamber of Commerce, intended to manage the port activity. The full name was significant of the role played: Oeffentliche Lagerhauser (Public General Warehouses). The abolition of the privilege of the Free Port of Trieste then led, from 1891, to the fencing of the new Port with the function of a "free zone". The majority of the large warehouses date back to the same period, built with the most advanced engineering techniques of the time, especially in the use of Santorini earth, cast iron columns and reinforced concrete. Paradoxically, already in 1902, when the Port was finally operational, work began on the Francesco Giuseppe port in S. Andrea.
But ultimately it was a positive sign: traffic was growing, goods were flowing in and the city was looking for new spaces for a logistics flow that was disruptive at the time.

Zeno Saracino – 23/10/2021
Source: TriesteNews