by Victor Caneva
My unplanned expedition to Scorcola left me refreshed and thirsty for discovery. Afterward, I decided to explore Trieste on foot every Wednesday for the remainder of my wife, Ashey’s, chemotherapy infusions. I want to see just how much I am able to experience and learn during these remaining 11 weeks. Wednesday, April 27th’s excursion was different, however. It was about settling an old score.
Since we began visiting Trieste, I’ve felt like Villa Geiringer, or the Castelletto, has been silently challenging me. Perched on top of Scorcola, my eyes have always been drawn to the Castelletto, while walking from San Vito further into town. As I walked my boys to school, it was as if the Castelletto constantly taunted me, “You’ll never make it up here!” That day, I decided it would end.
I knew that Villa Geiringer was now The European School of Trieste (what a place to go to school!) and that it had been occupied by German forces during World War II, but I didn’t know how close I could get to it. As an informative InTrieste article recently relayed, you can’t get too close to the Castelletto, but I didn’t know that yet…
Castles have captured my imagination since living in Spain as a young child. I even love the pseudo castelli that were very popular with the nouveau riche of the late 19th century and early 20th century. There are over 40 of these “castles” scattered throughout the province of Trieste and Villa Geiringer is one of the most well known.
Leaving the hospital, I charged eastward. As I had hiked up to Scorcola last week, I wanted to approach the hill from a different direction. I cut through the alluring public gardens at Villa Engelmann, one of my favorite green spaces in the city. Continuing northeast, I passed the botanical gardens and then descended the Scala San Luigi. One of the features that forms Trieste’s enigmatic personality is its myriad of stairwells. Some are grand and aristocratic. Others are shady and gracefully negotiate impossible urban hillsides. Many make you feel like you are ascending or descending into an entirely different time and place. I like to imagine sharply dressed Austro-Hungarians laboriously navigating these stairwells, red-faced and clinging to decorum. I wonder if Trieste was fabled throughout the empire not only for the coffee and free trade, but also for the hindquarters of its residents.
Emerging at Piazza dei Volontari Giuliani, I worked my way back uphill. After a considerable bit of climbing, I eventually turned onto via Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Something about this area felt vaguely familiar. The streets were wider and straighter. Homes were uniformly spaced and extremely similar to one another, a rare occurrence in a city with such eclectic architecture. The blocky properties on the northern side of the street backed right up to the frontier of Parco di Villa Giulia, boasting stairwells between them that rose into the verdant forest above. I would later learn that part of the southern border of Parco di Villa Giulia was developed as military housing by US forces following the Second World War. Having spent a lot of time on US military bases, this may have been the source of my sense of nostalgia.
Parco di Villa Giulia was formed by joining the collective wooded properties of the Geiringer, Krausenek, and Rumer families. Inaugurated on April 21st, 1934, this green polmone, or lung, boasts over 235,000 square meters of forest, an extensive network of trails, and even a frog pond cared for by the Natural History Museum of Trieste.
I looked up past the trees where the forest swallowed via Muratori and saw the main tower of my nemesis peeking above the canopy! Villa Geiringer was very close now. A path cut through the leafy parkland and disappeared at the tracks of the beleaguered Trieste-Opicina Tramway. I could go no further. The east side of the Castelletto was visible across the rails, but not the faux-medieval facade I ached to see. A wall and fencing waiting on the far side of the tracks convinced me it was time to concede defeat. Villa Geiringer had won, but I had a great time.
