In the same visit to the Revoltella Museum, you come across the coronation of a biblical king painted by Francesco Hayez in 1839 and a work by Alberto Burri made of sackcloth. A hundred and twenty years separate the two, and the museum has spent all of them buying.
This is the thing to know before you go in, because it changes the way you read the rooms. The Revoltella is not a private collection frozen at the moment of its owner’s death: it is a private collection whose owner also left the money to keep it growing. Baron Pasquale Revoltella died in 1869, and in 1872 his house opened to the public with his paintings still inside; since then the museum has kept buying, largely at the Venice Biennale, and went on doing so into the second half of the twentieth century.
The result is a building that reads like a stratigraphy. Below are the baron’s own rooms, their furniture and wall coverings remade to match the colours recorded in the inventories; above is the modern art gallery, inside a neighbouring palazzo restored by Carlo Scarpa; at the top is a glazed terrace looking out to sea. Seven floors in all, around four thousand square metres and three hundred and fifty works on display.
This article is a guide to what you see as you climb, with the practical information at the end. If you are building your itinerary for the city, the general picture is in What to see in Trieste.
Who was Pasquale Revoltella, and where the money came from
Why would a timber merchant end up deciding the fate of a canal in Egypt? Because in nineteenth-century Trieste, the timber trade and the geography of the Mediterranean were the same business.
Revoltella was born in 1795 to a Venetian family and arrived in the city at the age of two. After an apprenticeship at a trading firm, in 1835 he opened his own timber and grain import business, which quickly took off. From there he moved into everything that mattered in Habsburg Trieste: shareholder of Assicurazioni Generali, board member of the Lloyd Austriaco, member of the Stock Exchange deputation.
Then came Suez. Revoltella understood, before most others, that a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea would put Trieste back on the main trade route, and in 1858 he travelled to Paris to negotiate with Ferdinand de Lesseps. He came out of it as vice-president of the Suez Canal Company, tasked with keeping Austrian capital inside the venture instead of letting it become an entirely French affair. In 1861 he went to Egypt in person to see the works. Revoltella is the most successful product of a political decision taken a century earlier, the free port of 1719, which drew merchants to Trieste from across the Mediterranean and gave the centre of the city the shape it still has today: that story is told in The Borgo Teresiano.
He never saw the opening. He died in September 1869, two months before the canal was inaugurated. He had never married and had no direct heirs, and he left almost everything to the city: the palazzo, the paintings, the furniture, the library, and an endowment for the museum to keep buying. That endowment is the reason there is also a Lucio Fontana in this building today.
You find the baron’s face in the green drawing room on the first floor, in the portrait Tito Agujari painted in 1862: red armchair, the cross of a chivalric order on his chest, and a rolled map in his hand.
The Cutting of the Isthmus of Suez, that is, money turned into marble
Climb the stairs, and on the first floor, before you even enter the apartment, you find a marble group on a tall dark plinth, in a vestibule with a scagliola floor and four columns of green Polcevera marble. It is called The Cutting of the Isthmus of Suez, sculpted by Pietro Magni in 1863, and Revoltella had it installed in his house six years before the canal existed.
It is worth reading closely, because it is an allegory built piece by piece. The standing female figure is Europe, and she holds the hands of two seated men on either side of her: the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which the canal is about to join. At the centre, Mercury, god of commerce, watches the scene and points Navigation towards the new route.
The detail almost no one notices is at the bottom right, half hidden: a genius of fame leaning on a headstone, engraving the names of those who took part in the undertaking. One of those names is the master of the house. It is not a monument to a feat of engineering, it is a monument to himself disguised as a feat of engineering, and in 1863 no one could yet know whether the undertaking would succeed.
Look at the lighting too: it falls from above, a display choice that lifts the white marble away from the dark background.
The Nymph of the Aqueduct, on the ground floor
On the ground floor, at the far end of the entrance hall, a second group by Pietro Magni closes the view of the double staircase. A naked woman emerges from a rock, drawing back a veil, an old bearded man stands beside her, two putti drink, and a winged genius holds a torch. An inscription runs along the base: Figlia al Timavo son, ninfa Aurisina (Daughter of the Timavo am I, the nymph of Aurisina).
This marble too, from 1858, celebrates a piece of infrastructure. In those years Trieste had just finished a new aqueduct fed by the Aurisina spring, in the Karst, which replaced the old Theresian aqueduct that could no longer serve a city that had grown too large. The nymph is the spring, the old man is the river Timavo from which legend has her born, and the two drinking putti stand for the population and the city’s maritime trade.
Two sculptures in the same house, one for the water arriving in the city and one for the water carrying its goods: if you are looking for a two-image portrait of what Trieste was in the nineteenth century, these are it.
The baron’s apartment, and the little window with the lenses
The first floor is the private house, the second floor is the reception rooms, and you can feel the difference between the two straight away.
Downstairs there is the private dining room with its original wood-coloured wall covering, the bedroom with a brass bed and plain furniture in American maple, and the study with its mahogany desk. On the study walls hang two paintings that reveal what the owner had on his mind: The Suez Canal by Alberto Rieger, from 1864, and his own summer residence painted by Eugenio Pizzolato in 1858.
In the corner sitting room hides the most amusing thing in the house: a small window fitted with a system of lenses, through which the baron could watch the square below without being seen. In the most sumptuous room on the floor, the green drawing room, the gilded furniture has tops in Egyptian alabaster, and two convex mirrors hang on either side of the entrance, distorting the room and making it look longer than it is.
The last room on this floor holds the two historical paintings of the private collection: The Coronation of Joash by Francesco Hayez, from 1839, and Alcibiades among the Hetaerae by Cosroe Dusi, from 1835. In the same room stands a finely inlaid table with four chairs, made for Revoltella by a Capuchin friar from Trieste to thank him for the money he had given to the friars’ new church.
On the second floor the register changes. The formal dining room has a table seating thirty-six, and the ballroom is all faux green and red marble painted in trompe l’oeil, lit from above through a skylight, with a cycle of seventeen panels on the arts and crafts, painted by Augusto Tominz in 1859. In the yellow drawing room stands a Sèvres vase given by King Louis XVIII, and one of the rooms holds a landscape attributed to Marco and Sebastiano Ricci, the oldest work in the whole museum.
The nineteenth century of the gallery, that is, what the museum bought afterwards
Climbing further, you leave the house behind and enter the museum proper, and the collecting criterion changes: no longer the taste of one man, but the choices of a board that went shopping at the exhibitions.
The piece the museum commissioned directly, and one of those it is proudest of, is Mohammed’s Prayer by Domenico Morelli, the great Neapolitan orientalist painter. The frame is not an accessory chosen by the museum: the painter himself designed it for this room.
Next to it you find the Italian nineteenth century as it was being bought at the time, and as it is rarely found gathered in a single room today. There is Bivouac by Giovanni Fattori, the Macchiaioli way of telling war by watching soldiers standing still rather than charging. There is Morning on the Giudecca by Guglielmo Ciardi, from 1892, which carries the Venetian view into painting built on light. There is Ave Maria by Luigi Nono, a domestic interior staked entirely on emotion, and there is The Evening Bell by Pietro Fragiacomo, from 1893.
Stop, though, in front of The Sailor’s Return by Gerolamo Induno, from 1876. The title promises a happy scene, the painting shows another: the sailor reaches the quay leaning on two crutches, the girl in a white shawl watches him in silence, and in the background, in the haze, stands the lighthouse. In a city that lived on shipping, a painting like this was no picturesque subject.
De Nittis’ Lady with a Dog, the painting people come for
The museum’s most important work was painted by a man from Puglia in Paris, and the museum bought it thirty-six years later, in Venice.
Lady with a Dog (Return from the Races) is an oil on canvas by Giuseppe De Nittis, 150 by 90 centimetres, dated 1878. A woman in a black dress walks towards us, a dark veil falling almost to her lips; she holds a large dog by its collar and grips a riding crop in her other hand. Behind her the Bois de Boulogne recedes into shadow under a darkening sky, with tiny figures and carriages returning from the racecourse.
De Nittis was born in Barletta in 1846, joined the Macchiaioli in Florence in 1866, and moved to Paris in 1872, where he exhibited alongside the Impressionists while remaining faithful to a treatment of volume they had abandoned. His reputation as a fashionable, worldly painter cost him dearly at home: Italian critics kept their distance from him for most of his life.
This is where the story becomes a museum’s story. The painting was shown at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 under the title Return from the Races, pleased audiences at the Turin National Exhibition of 1880, and it was only at the Venice Biennale of 1914 that Italian critics finally agreed to recognise De Nittis as a master. The Revoltella bought it there, on that occasion, when the artist had already been dead for thirty years. Today it carries inventory number 375 and is the strongest piece in the collection.
Veruda, Svevo and early twentieth-century Trieste
What is a painter almost unknown outside Trieste doing in a museum that shows De Nittis and Fontana? That painter was the best friend of Italo Svevo, and the Revoltella holds a substantial body of his work.
Umberto Veruda was born in Trieste in 1868, studied at the Munich Academy alongside fellow citizens Carlo Wostry and Isidoro Grünhut, and returned to the city as a successful portraitist, with a broad brushwork learned from the German Impressionists. He met Ettore Schmitz, that is, Italo Svevo, at the Caffè Chiozza, and the two became inseparable: the sculptor Stefano Balli in Svevo’s novel As a Man Grows Older is modelled on him.
In the spring of 1904, after the death of Veruda’s mother, Svevo hosted him in Burano. There the painter made Fondamenta a Burano, oil on panel, his last painting: three women walking along a canal with white parasols and a basket of fruit, built entirely in strokes of solid colour. Back in Trieste, he died on 29 August of that year, aged thirty-six.
Note: the Revoltella holds many works by Veruda and his Trieste contemporaries (Vito Timmel, Glauco Cambon, Piero Marussig, Eugenio Scomparini), but a good part of them are kept in storage and the rotation changes. If you are coming for a specific painting from this group, it is worth asking at the ticket desk whether it is currently on display.
Carlo Scarpa, the sixth floor, and twenty-three years of building work
How long can a museum’s refurbishment take? Here the building site stayed open for twenty-three years, and the architect who had designed it died fourteen years before the museum reopened.
The museum expanded early: as far back as 1907 the city council bought the neighbouring Palazzo Brunner, because the baron’s house was no longer enough. In 1962 the task of reorganising and enlarging the museum inside Brunner and Basevi went to Carlo Scarpa, who presented his project on 5 April 1963: to respect and restore Palazzo Revoltella to its original dignity, keep the perimeter walls of the other two buildings and rebuild their interiors from scratch, adding one more floor.
Work began in 1968 and stopped almost at once. Scarpa gave up directing it, the site remained open on and off for over twenty years under Franco Vattolo and then Giampaolo Bartoli, and Palazzo Brunner was finally handed over to the museum at the end of October 1991. The museum reopened on 13 June 1992 with an exhibition called Da Canova a Burri. Il museo in mostra. Scarpa had died in 1978: twenty-nine years passed between his project and the opening, and he never saw a single room finished.
The part of the project where his idea comes through most clearly is the last one, the sixth floor. It is a room with panoramic windows over the city and the sea and light falling from above, and after five floors of enclosed rooms the effect is that of stepping out into the open.
Up there is Italy’s second half of the twentieth century, bought almost entirely at the Venice Biennale between 1948 and 1968. There are the abstract painters of the Gruppo degli Otto (Afro, Corpora, Moreni, Santomaso, Morlotti, Vedova and Birolli), the informel and spatialism of Capogrossi, Scanavino, Burri and Lucio Fontana, and the figurative work of Guttuso, Zigaina and Fausto Pirandello. Among the sculptures look for Child with a Duck by Giacomo Manzù, from 1947, the Portrait of Carlo Carrà that Marino Marini modelled in 1946, and the Terracotta Portrait by Emilio Greco, from 1952, along with the bronzes of Dino and Mirko Basaldella, of Agenore Fabbri and of Arnaldo Pomodoro.
Looking out to sea through those windows, with Burri at your back, the article’s argument closes itself: the baron who bought Hayez also paid for this.
Practical information
Data checked on 4 September 2026 on the official website museorevoltella.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. A full ticket costs 8 euros and covers only the permanent collection, that is, all seven levels between Palazzo Revoltella and the modern art gallery. The reduced ticket costs 6 euros. School groups pay 1 euro per student. Temporary exhibitions have a separate ticket, so check at the point of purchase exactly what you are buying. The audio guide is a downloadable app and costs 3.50 euros.
Opening hours. The museum opens every day from 10 am to 7 pm and closes on Tuesdays. Last admission is at 6 pm. The museum stays open on national holidays and on 3 November even when those days fall on a Tuesday. It closes on 25 December and 1 January, while on 24 and 31 December it closes at 2 pm.
Free admission. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month and on 3 November, the feast of Saint Justus, patron saint of the city.
Getting there. The museum occupies an entire block on Piazza Venezia, with the entrance at via Diaz 27. From Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia it is a five-minute walk along the waterfront. From Trieste Centrale railway station the walk takes just over twenty minutes.
Accessibility. All floors of the modern art gallery are accessible, along with the ground floor and second floor of Palazzo Revoltella. At present dogs are not allowed, a temporary restriction for the safety of the works.
How much time it takes. The baron’s apartment and the reception rooms take forty minutes. Climbing all the way to the sixth floor and stopping at the main works, a full visit takes an hour and a half. If you also want to look at the nineteenth-century section room by room, allow two.
The Revoltella is a few minutes from the heart of the city, so it fits into half a morning inside the itinerary of What to see in Trieste. The advice is not to leave it for last: after five floors, the terrace on the sixth deserves to be seen with a clear head.
Photo credits: facade by Szeder László; the Cutting of the Isthmus of Suez group, the Aurisina nymph and the ballroom by Reinhard Dietrich (CC BY-SA 4.0). All from Wikimedia Commons; reproductions of the paintings are in the public domain.
