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English
The Railway and the Development of the Old Port of Trieste
The salvos of the cannons of the ships anchored in the Trieste harbour reverberate in the 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 voices of the common people wind through the air, a spark of anticipation and excitement. When the hands of the pocket watches ticking in the pockets of the waiting bourgeois mark 10.30:XNUMX, a whistle penetrates 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...
Gregory Ananian, the Sultan's Physician Who Fled to Trieste
Gregory Ananian is a peculiar figure: apparently very modern, yet full of contradictions, much closer to the modern age than to the nineteenth century, to the legacies of the Ottoman Empire than to the enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Ananian was born in Istanbul (1770), within the community of Armenians of Catholic faith. From a wealthy family, Ananian was thus able to attend the faculty of medicine at the University of Padua, then completing his internship in Paris, where there was a school run by Capuchin friars aimed at training Armenians as interpreters and missionaries. Yet, after this immersion in late eighteenth-century Europe, Ananian chose to...
