Stand at the far end of Trieste’s Grand Canal, on the sea side, and look inland. At the end of the vista is a classical temple with six Ionic columns and six saints on top, which is a Catholic church. To the right, a hundred steps earlier, five blue domes rise above the rooftops, and that is a Serbian Orthodox church. Keep walking towards the waterfront and you find a third, Greek Orthodox, with two Baroque bell towers looking out over the Adriatic. Behind the main post office there is a Lutheran church with a neo-Gothic spire, and ten minutes on foot away the synagogue. Behind you, up on the hill, sits the old town, which is an entirely different matter: the hill of San Giusto, with its medieval cathedral and Roman forum.
This is not folklore, and it is the part that guidebooks explain worst. It is town planning. This district did not grow organically: it was designed in a single stroke, on land that did not previously exist, and its churches are the ground plan of a political decision taken in Vienna.
The pillar article on what to see in Trieste gives the Grand Canal and Joyce’s cafés a single section. Here we take the whole district, building by building, with the real opening hours at the end.
A district built over salt
Why does the Borgo Teresiano have straight streets while Trieste’s old town does not? Because there was no earlier city under its streets: there were saltpans, that is, seawater basins separated by embankments, just outside the medieval walls. The ground itself had to be invented before it could be built on, and anyone building from scratch draws a grid.
The project begins in 1730, when Emperor Charles VI buys the saltpans west of the city to make a new district. His daughter Maria Theresa carries it forward, and in 1749 has the medieval walls demolished and removes the boundary between old and new. The planning is signed by Johann Conrad de Gerhardt, and a commission led by Francesco Bonomo oversees the works. The result is an orthogonal grid that counts as one of the earliest modern town plans in Italy, and it is why you never get lost here.
The salt, however, is gone only from the surface, not from the subsoil, which remains soft reclaimed ground. When the Lutheran community opens the building site for its own church in 1871, it has to drive over two hundred oak piles twenty-five metres long to bear the weight. Walking among the palazzi you would never guess it, but the lagoon is still there underfoot.
The free port of 1719, and who landed in Trieste
The district is born from a signature. On 18 March 1719 Charles VI declares Trieste and Fiume free ports, abolishes customs duties and guarantees anyone wishing to settle there the free exercise of trade, with no passport or special licence required. In a city that then numbered a few thousand inhabitants, a new population arrives within two generations: Greeks, Serbs, Jews, Armenians, German Lutherans, Swiss Reformed, English.
The pull was not only fiscal. The Instruction accompanying the free-port charter, in 1725, allows non-Catholics to practise their faith in private: in eighteenth-century Europe that is a rare commodity, worth as much as the customs exemption, and merchants weighed it when choosing where to open shop. Full freedom comes later, with Joseph II’s Patent of Toleration of 13 October 1781, extended to Jews at the start of the following year.
These newcomers left their own palazzi along the banks, and the most striking one bears a Greek name. Palazzo Carciotti, with its green dome and six Ionic columns facing the sea, was built between 1798 and 1805 for Demetrio Carciotti, a merchant from Corfu who had arrived in Trieste as a boy. The architect was Matteo Pertsch, and we will meet him again shortly, in front of another façade.
The Grand Canal used to reach right up to the church
The canal is not a Venetian affectation: it is the last stretch of the saltpan system, adapted. Between 1754 and 1756 the Venetian entrepreneur Matteo Pirona deepens the main collector channel of the basins and turns it into an inner dock, so that sailing ships could unload their cargo inside the district rather than on the shore.
Today the canal ends against a low quay, in front of a garden with a fountain. It was not always so: it used to reach right up to the steps of Sant’Antonio, and ships moored beneath the church’s colonnade. The final stretch was filled in in 1934, with the rubble from the demolition of the old town, and out of it came the present-day Piazza Sant’Antonio. The drawing by Marco Moro from 1854 below shows the earlier situation better than any explanation could: masts and rigging a few metres from the neoclassical pediment.
The three bridges were called white, red and green after the colour they were painted, and they were swing bridges, because ships had to pass beneath them. Today they are fixed, built in masonry, and only small boats pass under them at low tide. On the Ponte Rosso stands the statue of James Joyce, a long-time resident of this district.
Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo, the temple that closes the view
Look at it from a distance before you approach, because it was built to be seen from a distance. The church that closes the canal is dedicated to saint Anthony of Padua, and locals call it Sant’Antonio Nuovo, to distinguish it from the older church of the same dedication. Along the pediment runs the inscription DIVO ANTONIO THAVMATVRGO, and that is where the official name comes from.
The history of the project shows how fast the district was growing. In the mid-eighteenth century there was a private chapel here; around 1771 it was replaced by a Baroque church, which within a generation proved too small. In 1808 a competition awarded the design of the new church to Pietro Nobile, building began in 1825, and consecration came only in 1849. Forty-one years between the design and the first mass.
Nobile explains why this church looks more like Vienna than Italy. Born in Ticino in 1776, he directed the Fabbriche di Trieste (the city’s public works office) from 1807 to 1817, then moved to the capital, where he built the Theseustempel in the Volksgarten (1819-1822), a copy of the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, and the Burgtor of the Hofburg in 1824. The same man who planted a Greek temple in the middle of Vienna closed a Trieste canal with a portico of six Ionic columns.
Along the attic stand six statues carved by Francesco Bosa in 1842, and they are not generic ornament: they are the city’s patron saints, namely saint Justus, saint Sergius, saint Servulus, saint Maurus, saint Euphemia and saint Thecla. Inside, the surprise is that the largest church in Trieste is also the most sober: a bright nave marked out by columns, coffered vaults, high light. There is no gold here, and in ten minutes we will see plenty of it.
San Spiridione, the temple of the Serbs
What is a Serbian Orthodox temple doing a hundred and fifty metres from a Catholic church, on the same canal? It stands there because in 1751 Maria Theresa granted the Orthodox congregation of Trieste permission to build, and Greek and Serbian merchants, who then formed a single community, raised a church in 1753 dedicated to the Holy Trinity and to saint Spyridon, the bishop of Trimythous whose relics rest in Corfu.
The concession came with conditions, and they are the most interesting part of the whole story. The imperial patent allowed non-Catholic faiths to build oratories, «but without bells, bell towers or a public entrance from the street, where these did not already exist». Tolerance yes, visibility no: the 1753 church stood closed inside an enclosure and did not front the road.
That first church was demolished in 1861, during the works to fill in the district’s saltpans. The now-wealthy community held an international competition in 1858 and entrusted the choice to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, which awarded the project to the Milanese architect Carlo Maciachini, the same architect behind Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale; site direction went to the Trieste engineer Pietro Palese. This time the main façade faced the public street, with a direct entrance from it, and to obtain this the community had to formally ask the mayor to lift the old restrictions. It got them.
The building is forty metres high, thirty-eight metres long and thirty-one wide, and can hold one thousand six hundred worshippers. The plan is a Greek cross, covered by a large dome with four corner cupolas that from a distance look like bell towers. The outer cladding comes from the quarries of Santa Croce in the Karst and from the Brijuni Islands in Istria, and the walls carry gold-ground mosaics: above the main entrance is saint Spyridon, above the northern entrance the archangel Michael with saints Athanasius and Gregory.
The sources disagree on the dates, and it is worth knowing that. The city’s tourist office gives the opening for worship as 2 September 1868; the Serbian Orthodox community writes that the temple was completed in all its structures on 9 July 1869 and blessed by archimandrite German Anđelić, sent by patriarch Samuilo Maširević; the Municipality of Trieste dates the blessing to 20 September 1869. The three versions can be reconciled if the church began functioning a year before the official ceremony, which is what almost always happens. The mosaics, in any case, came much later: the building was declared finished on 24 December 1885.
The four Russian icons, and the lamp that is not from 1772
Inside, the logic is reversed compared with Sant’Antonio. The walls are covered with oil paintings on gold ground, executed to imitate mosaic: the patrons had San Marco in Venice and the churches of Ravenna in mind, but real mosaics cost too much and were kept for the façades. If you want the comparison with the original, it is all there in the basilica of San Marco and in the apses of Ravenna.
The showpiece is the iconostasis, the carved screen that separates the sanctuary from the congregation. In the bottom row, on either side of the royal doors, are four icons made in Russia in the early nineteenth century: the Virgin, Christ, saint Spyridon and the Annunciation. They are clad in gold and silver with precious stones, and according to the community they come from the old eighteenth-century church, meaning they moved buildings along with the congregation. In the upper row are the Serbian saints, Simeon, Sava, Stefan Prvovenčani and Tsar Uroš; in the third row, the baptism, the crucifixion and the resurrection.
In front of the iconostasis hangs a large silver votive lamp, and here there is a fact to correct. Many sources, including the city’s tourist portal, describe it as a gift from Grand Duke Paul Petrovich Romanov during a visit to Trieste in 1772. The date does not hold up: in 1772 the future Tsar Paul I was eighteen years old and living in Russia. The Romanov grand tour of Europe, undertaken under the name of the Counts of the North, took place in 1781-82, and the Serbian Orthodox community of Trieste, who own that lamp, write that the gift arrived in January 1782. When the owner and the tourist office contradict each other, the owner wins.
Beneath the Holy Table is a solid silver bas-relief of the Last Supper in a Leonardesque composition, and above it a two-metre cross in gold, silver and semi-precious stones. Part of the treasury was plundered during the Second World War, however, and with it a gold-bound Gospel donated by the Russian countess Julia Samoylova.
San Nicolò dei Greci, the church born of a dispute over language
Why did the Greeks leave the canal to build on the seafront? Because in the 1753 church they could no longer understand each other. Greeks and Serbs shared the rite but not the language, and from 1769 the liturgy was celebrated in Serbian, because the Illyrian faithful had become the majority. In 1770 the Greeks asked the government for a separation; the Greek-Oriental community was officially established in 1782, and its first act was to request permission to build a temple of its own, this time facing the sea.
Construction ran from 1784 to 1795, with the first mass celebrated in the unfinished church on 18 February 1787. The church is dedicated to saint Nicholas, patron of sailors and merchants, whose relics rest in the basilica of San Nicola in Bari: for a community that lived off ships this was no generic devotion.
The façade you see today is not the original one. Around 1818 the community commissioned Matteo Pertsch, the architect of Palazzo Carciotti, who redesigned it in neoclassical style with six Ionic pilasters, a widened pediment and two bell towers with slate cupolas of Baroque Austro-Bavarian flavour. It is worth rereading those two bell towers against the 1751 ban: by the time they were built, Joseph II’s patent had lifted the restriction a generation earlier.
The interior is a single nave with two galleries, for the choir and for the women’s gallery, and the flat ceiling is filled by a Christ in Glory among angels painted by Giacomo Graziosi and completed in 1799, with illusionistic architecture that feigns depth where there is none. On the side walls hang two canvases by the Pirano-born painter Cesare dell’Acqua, from 1821. The iconostasis is dense with silver-clad icons, and unlike the one in San Spiridione it can be examined up close.
A few steps away, at Riva Tre Novembre 7, the same community runs a museum with icons from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, from the Aegean to Crete to Mount Athos, plus a carved and gilded wooden epitaphios from 1823. It opens only on Fridays and Saturdays, and almost no guidebook mentions it.
The Lutheran church and the synagogue, where the district ends
The Lutherans arrived first in order of time: the first five merchant families landed in 1717, two years even before the free-port charter. The community was officially established in 1778, and in 1786 it bought at auction, for 7,480 florins, a former Catholic church deconsecrated during the Josephine reforms. It sold the building back to the municipality in 1870, when it obtained permission to build one of its own.
The Lutheran Evangelical church in Largo Odorico Panfili, behind the main post office, was designed in Breslau in 1870 by the engineer Carl Johann Christian Zimmermann in German neo-Gothic style, built under the direction of Giovanni Andrea Berlam and Giovanni Scalmanini, and inaugurated on 1 November 1874. It is built in Istrian stone, has a slate roof and a bell tower fifty metres tall, and along the tower run sculptures of fantastical animals that reward a minute spent looking up. Inside it holds two funerary monuments carved by Antonio Bosa around 1823 and brought here from the old church of the Rosary.
The synagogue, by contrast, stands just outside the Borgo Teresiano: cross Via Carducci and you enter the district of Barriera Nuova, where the building occupies a whole block between Via Donizetti, Via San Francesco and Via Zanetti, on Piazza Virgilio Giotti. It was built between 1908 and 1912 to a design by Ruggero Berlam and his son Arduino (the same Arduino who would go on to build the Faro della Vittoria) and inaugurated on 21 June 1912. By size it is considered second in Europe only to the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest. The exterior is in Sephardic style, with three great rose windows drawing the Star of David; the interior, with its golden mosaic vault and chandeliers, is instead full of Art Nouveau, and that is the best reason to book one of the guided tours.
The racial laws of 1938 closed it, and during the German occupation the Nazis reduced it to a storehouse for looted books and works of art. The silver ritual objects survived because the community had hidden them inside the building itself.
How to walk the district
The route plans itself, and the right order follows the calendar more than the geography, because the Lutheran church receives visitors only in the afternoon and San Nicolò dei Greci closes at midday.
Start at the Ponte Rosso around ten in the morning, with Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo open and the light coming from the east. On the bridge’s square stands a fountain from 1753 by Giovanni Battista Mazzoleni with a putto on top, which locals call Giovannin de Ponterosso because the water that fed it came from the district of San Giovanni: it is older than the canal that flows beside it. Then San Spiridione, two minutes away, if you find it open. From there walk down along the quay to the waterfront and to San Nicolò dei Greci, which closes at 12.30 pm and reopens at 3.30 pm.
The afternoon is the easy part, because from 4 pm onwards everything reopens. If you only have one afternoon, choose Friday: it is the only day when the Lutheran church, the synagogue and the Greek-Oriental museum all receive visitors, and the exact times are listed below.
One thing works better here than elsewhere: look at the buildings from a distance before you look at them up close. The Borgo Teresiano was designed with straight streets and visual axes, so every church was conceived to appear at the end of a vista. Seeing it from an angle, walking right up against it, means missing half the design.
Practical information
Data checked on 4 September 2026 on the official websites of the parish of Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo, the Greek-Oriental community, the Lutheran Evangelical community and the Jewish community of Trieste. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo, San Spiridione, San Nicolò dei Greci and the Lutheran church all have free admission. The synagogue can only be visited on the Jewish community’s guided tour, which is paid: the available sources give the full price as either 7 or 8 euros and the reduced price as either 4 or 5, and the community’s online ticket office cannot be read automatically, so the exact figure is best confirmed at the ticket desk at Via San Francesco 19.
Opening hours. Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo is open every day from 7 am to 12 pm and 4 pm to 7 pm. San Nicolò dei Greci is open from 9 am to 12.30 pm and 3.30 pm to 7 pm, and closes on Mondays and Sundays. The Lutheran church welcomes visitors on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 4 pm to 7 pm, and holds a service on Sunday at 10.30 am. The synagogue is visited on a guided group tour on Sunday at 10 am and 11.30 am, Monday at 4.30 pm, Tuesday at 10 am, Wednesday and Thursday at 4.30 pm; individual visitors do not book and simply arrive at the entrance a few minutes early. The Museum of the Greek-Oriental Community, at Riva Tre Novembre 7, is open on Fridays and Saturdays from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm and 3.30 pm to 6.30 pm.
Note: San Spiridione does not publish visiting hours. The temple opens around services, and the hours page on the Serbian Orthodox community’s website is empty, and also carries an expired security certificate that many browsers block. The hours for the day are best asked on site or at the community’s office, at Via Genova 12. I would rather leave you without a figure than give you the wrong one.
Dress code. To enter the synagogue you need covered shoulders and legs, and the rule applies to everyone. In the two Orthodox churches the same care is advisable, and during services you stand at the back without taking photographs.
Getting there. Trieste’s central station stands at the northern end of the Borgo Teresiano, ten minutes on foot from the Grand Canal. From Piazza Unità d’Italia you reach the mouth of the canal in five minutes along the waterfront. The district is flat, and you do not need any transport to cross it.
How much time it needs. The two churches on the canal, with a walk along the quay, take an hour and a half. Adding San Nicolò dei Greci, the Lutheran church and the guided tour of the synagogue fills a whole day, broken by the midday closures.
The Borgo Teresiano reads clearly because it was born from a single decision, made at a single moment in time. Its churches are not a mosaic of peoples who happened to end up there: they are the material consequence of a customs charter of 1719 and of a permit to worship that in 1751 came with a ban on having a bell tower. When you walk between Sant’Antonio and San Spiridione, what you are crossing is the distance between two articles of law.
If this story of mosaics and domes has piqued your curiosity, the natural next stop is the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, where the coexistence of three cultures produced a ceiling that exists nowhere else. And if it is the borderland that interests you, Ljubljana is an hour and a half’s drive away.
Photo credits: Grand Canal at sunset and Palazzo Carciotti by Luca Aless; Grand Canal from the bridge, facade and interior of Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo by Zairon; interior of San Nicolò dei Greci by Kaethe17; Riva Tre Novembre, Lutheran church and synagogue by Andrzej Otrębski (CC BY-SA 4.0); exterior and iconostasis of San Spiridione by Fred Romero, mosaic lunette of San Spiridione by Leandro Neumann Ciuffo (CC BY 2.0); Piazza Ponterosso fountain by Twice25 and Rinina25 (CC BY 2.5). The drawing of the Grand Canal by Marco Moro (1854) is in the public domain. All from Wikimedia Commons.
