In What to see in Trieste in 2 days the Risiera di San Sabba takes up one short chapter, and that chapter is not enough. This page extends it, because anyone searching for the Risiera is usually looking for two things at once: what happened here between 1943 and 1945, and what can be seen there now.
The Risiera was the only Nazi extermination camp fitted with a crematorium on Italian soil. It has been a national monument since 15 April 1965 and is today a Civic Museum of the Municipality of Trieste, with free admission, in an outlying district south of the centre.
What visitors walk through, though, is not the 1944 building. It is a work of architecture from 1975, designed by the Trieste-born Romano Boico, built by subtraction: Boico demolished, emptied and enclosed, and what he left standing has to be read alongside what he took away. It is the part that almost no other page discusses, and it is the reason this article dwells on it at length.
Why a rice-husking plant became an extermination camp
Why did the Nazis choose a rice-husking plant? Because by 1943 it was no longer a rice-husking plant. It was a barracks, with sealed warehouses, an inner courtyard invisible from the street and an industrial chimney forty metres high, in a working-class district south of the city: converting it required very little.
Construction of the complex began in 1898 and continued until 1913. The plant processed rice until the early 1930s; the Royal Army then used part of it as a depot, and from 1940 turned it into a barracks.
After 8 September 1943 Germany occupied Trieste and made it the capital of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, a territory effectively removed from the Italian Social Republic and administered directly by the Reich. The Risiera first served as a camp for captured Italian soldiers; from late October 1943 it became a Polizeihaftlager, a security police detention camp.
Who was in command, and where he came from
On 13 September 1943 Heinrich Himmler put SS Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik, born in Trieste, in charge of the police apparatus of the Adriatic Littoral. Himmler had previously entrusted him with running Operation Reinhard, the plan to exterminate the Jews of the General Government in occupied Poland.
Globocnik brought to Trieste much of the staff who had worked with him in Poland: a core of around ninety SS men plus a group of Ukrainian auxiliaries, under the command first of Christian Wirth and then of August Dietrich Allers. The same men had taken part in Aktion T4 (the “euthanasia” programme that between 1939 and 1941 killed disabled people and the mentally ill in Germany and Austria) and had then served at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka.
This is the detail that sets the Risiera apart from Italy’s other camps: what arrived here was not just any unit, but the team from the Polish extermination camps, bringing its technical expertise with it.
There were three tasks: capturing and deporting the Jews of the Littoral while plundering their property, holding and killing Italian, Slovenian and Croatian hostages and partisans, and routing prisoners onward to Germany and Poland. Of the roughly 1,450 Jews deported from the Adriatic Littoral, around twenty people returned from the extermination camps. The community that was struck was one of the oldest and largest in Italy, and its synagogue, inaugurated in 1912, is still one of the largest buildings in the city centre: I tell that story in The Borgo Teresiano.
The seventeen cells and the death cell
Under the portico that opens onto the courtyard is a large room that, during the camp’s operation, held prisoners awaiting execution or transfer. It is the room the memorial calls the death cell, and it has been left as it was.
In the building next door, on the ground floor, seventeen tiny cells were built in the spring of 1944, each of which could hold up to six prisoners at a time. The wooden doors are the original ones, and the size of the interior is better judged from the corridor than from photographs: they are carved out of the thickness of a wall, not rooms in their own right.
Killings were carried out by hanging, shooting, gassing and blows to the head with a club, and were the work of the SS and the Ukrainian auxiliaries under their command. Testimony gathered at the 1976 trial established that executions almost always took place at night and that the SS set the dogs on the prisoners and played loud music to drown out the screams.
The crematorium, and the steel strip that now marks its place
The crematorium was built into the plant’s drying room, the space where the rice had once been dried, and set at the base of the chimney. It was designed by Erwin Lambert, the same engineer who had built the gas chambers of the T4 programme and of the Aktion Reinhard camps.
It came into use in the first days of April 1944 (the museum gives 4 April) and was first used to burn the bodies of around seventy people executed at Villa Opicina. The ashes were loaded onto military vehicles and scattered at sea, to erase any trace.
On 29 April 1945, as they withdrew, the Germans blew up the crematorium, the forty-metre chimney and most of the camp’s documentation. The destruction of the archives is one of the reasons the number of victims remains uncertain.
Today, where the plant once stood, a slightly recessed steel path runs across the courtyard paving, tracing on the ground the outline of the furnace, the smoke duct and the base of the chimney. Where the chimney once rose stands a metal stele, called Pietà P.N. 30, three staggered profiles rising vertically like smoke. It is all that is left of the plant, and it is crossed on foot.
How many people died here, and why the museum gives no number
How many victims did the Risiera claim? The museum’s panel on the subject opens by stating that no precise figure exists at the current state of historical research, either for the number of prisoners who passed through the Polizeihaftlager or for the number killed there.
What can be said is who claims what. At the 1976 trial, a figure of “no fewer than 2,000 victims” was put forward; some historians give a higher number, between 4,000 and 5,000. The Slovenian journalist Albin Bubnič, of the Primorski Dnevnik, presented the judges with a partial list of 317 names of people killed at the Risiera, a figure that can today be raised to 349.
The victims were mostly members of the Italian, Slovenian and Croatian Resistance, hostages seized in round-ups, and civilians arrested as suspected partisan sympathisers. To their number should be added the roughly twenty-five Jews recorded as killed inside the camp because they were deemed unfit to travel or accused of breaking camp rules.
Anyone who cites a single figure is therefore choosing between estimates that differ by more than double. The memorial does not choose, and neither does this page.
The 1976 trial, and how it ended
The trial for the crimes committed at the Risiera opened before the Assize Court of Trieste on 16 February 1976, more than thirty years after the events, and closed with the verdict on 29 April. 174 witnesses testified, survivors and relatives of victims acting as civil parties among them, along with five historians called on to reconstruct the context: Enzo Collotti, Tone Ferenc, Mario Pacor, Galliano Fogar and Teodoro Sala.
The defendants were two officers, August Dietrich Allers and Josef Oberhauser. Allers died during the investigation and proceedings against him were dropped. Oberhauser, tried in absentia, was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction in 1978.
That sentence was never served: Germany did not extradite its own citizens, and Oberhauser remained in Munich. In April 2026, fifty years after the trial opened, Trieste’s Palace of Justice unveiled a plaque in his memory.
Romano Boico: taking away and enclosing, rather than adding
What can be seen today, if the crematorium was blown up and the buildings lay in ruins? What visitors see is a work of architecture, and it deserves to be read as one, because it is a memorial built entirely by subtraction: there are not many others like it in Italy.
Between 1966 and 1969 the Municipality of Trieste held two competitions for a Museum of the Resistance. The first closed with no winner, the jury withholding its judgement and flagging three projects worth developing further; the second, by invitation, pitted Romano Boico against Costantino Dardi and Gianugo Polesello, and Boico (1910-1975) won. The opening ceremony took place on 24 April 1975, the same year the architect died.
Boico described his own work in a few lines, which the museum displays:
“I set out to take away and enclose rather than to add. Having removed the ruined buildings, I enclosed the site within concrete walls eleven metres high, arranged so as to form an unsettling entrance. In my intention, the walled courtyard reads as an open-air basilica. The prisoners’ building has been completely emptied, and the timber structures stripped back as far as seemed necessary. The seventeen cells and the death cell remain unaltered. In the courtyard, a stark steel path, slightly recessed: the imprint of the furnace, the smoke duct and the base of the chimney.”
Every element of the memorial follows from those lines, including the decision not to comment on anything. The project adds no inscriptions and no commemorative sculpture: what visitors encounter are bare surfaces and absences marked on the ground.
The unsettling entrance, and the courtyard as an open-air basilica
The entrance Boico describes is a straight corridor three metres wide, compressed between two concrete walls that rise eleven metres. From its mouth, you cannot see the far end, only a strip of sky. The compression is deliberate: it detaches the memorial from the surrounding district and removes any side view from those entering.
The corridor opens under a portico and then into the courtyard, where the space suddenly widens. The concrete wall enclosing the site stands in place of the two large industrial sheds that were demolished: in place of volumes there is a perimeter, and inside the perimeter there is emptiness. Boico calls it an open-air basilica, and the phrase should be taken literally, because the courtyard has the proportions of a nave and no roof at all.
Along the wall of the entrance corridor hang the memorial plaques placed over the years by communities and associations: among them, one from the Jewish Community of Trieste, one for Jehovah’s Witnesses and one for homosexual victims of the persecution. They came after Boico, and they are the only text the memorial displays outdoors.
The Hall of the Crosses, a building stripped of its floors
The four-storey building on one side of the courtyard held many of the Risiera’s prisoners, Jews awaiting deportation among them. Boico stripped out its floors, leaving standing only the timber framework: beams and cross-bracing that now span a single space four storeys high, and that read from below as a sequence of crosses.
That is where the room’s name comes from, not from any added religious symbol. It is the result of a subtraction: by removing the floors the prisoners once stood on, Boico exposed the structure that had supported them, and the geometry of the timber did the rest.
Please note: at present the Hall of the Crosses is only partially accessible, and entry to the memorial is from Piazzale De Simone.
The Museum: the returned objects and the drawings of Zoran Music
The Museum occupies the rooms that were the camp’s mess hall and kitchen, and was refurbished in 2016. The exhibition covers the fascist border policy, the war and the occupation, antisemitism and the Shoah in the Littoral, collaborationism, the Resistance and the trial, with texts in Italian, Slovenian and English.
Two donations formed its core. In 2000 the Jewish Community of Trieste handed over some of the objects plundered from the Jews of the Adriatic Littoral, which the Allies had seized from the fleeing Nazis and which had then lain forgotten at the Ministry of the Treasury in Rome. In 2002 the National Association of Former Deportees of Trieste donated objects and documents relating to the political deportation.
There is also a section devoted to art, signed by artists who passed through the camps. The museum holds the lithographs and etchings of Anton Zoran Music, born in Gorizia in 1909 and deported to Dachau on 18 November 1944, where he secretly drew what he saw; from those sheets came, twenty years later, the cycle We Are Not the Last, one of the best-known figurative responses to the extermination. Alongside are drawings by Giovanni Talleri, a military draft dodger, and by Nereo Laureni, a military internee.
In the Hall of Commemorations, the former engine room that Boico turned into a secular chapel, the sculptural group The Martyrs by Marcello Mascherini has stood since 1975, and has become the image by which the Risiera is best known. It is the only work of art in the whole complex, and it stands exactly where Boico’s design called for none.
How to behave here
The memorial receives around a hundred thousand visitors a year, many of them students, and asks a few things worth knowing before you arrive.
Phones must be switched off or silenced for the whole visit. Smoking is not permitted, e-cigarettes included. Animals are not allowed.
Photography is permitted, and it is worth saying so because many visitors assume the opposite and keep their camera in a bag for the whole visit.
The floor is uneven in the death cell, in the cells and in the Hall of the Crosses, and the memorial itself asks visitors to take care: the stone slabs are irregular, there are changes in level and the light is dim. Closed, sturdy shoes are best.
Practical information
Data checked on 4 September 2026 on the official site risierasansabba.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Admission. Admission is free and does not require booking for individual visitors. Groups must book for visits between March and May.
Opening hours. From 1 March to 11 October the memorial opens every day from 9 am to 7 pm, with last entry at 6.30 pm. From 12 October it opens every day from 9 am to 5 pm, with last entry at 4.30 pm.
What is restricted. At present, entry is from Piazzale De Simone and the Hall of the Crosses is only partially accessible.
Audio guide and guided tours. The audio guide costs 3.50 euros, is available in seven languages and is recommended from age twelve upward. Guided tours are booked through CoopCulture.
Where it is. The memorial occupies number 5, via Giovanni Palatucci, in the San Sabba district, just over three kilometres south of Piazza Unità d’Italia.
Getting there. Buses 8 and 10 run there from the city centre. By car, there is a free unattended car park and a space reserved for disabled visitors on via Rio Primario. Bicycle racks are available at the entrance.
How much time it takes. The monument itself, meaning the corridor, the courtyard, the cells and the Hall of the Crosses, takes about forty minutes. Adding the Museum and its panels brings the visit to about an hour and a half.
Before or after
The Risiera is a quarter of an hour’s bus ride from the centre and does not combine well with anything else: it is best kept on its own, at the start or end of a day, rather than fitted between two lighter stops. The rest of the city is covered in What to see in Trieste in 2 days, which gives the full picture for both days.
If the theme of borders interests you, the same frontier that made Trieste a city of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral is crossed today in an hour and a half’s drive to Ljubljana: many of the Risiera’s prisoners were Slovenian, and their story begins on the other side of that border.
Photo credits: courtyard, prisoners’ building, cells, entrance corridor, enclosing wall, Hall of the Crosses and plaques by Accurimbono (CC BY-SA 4.0); crematorium outline by Andrek02 (CC0); brick buildings by Mivanci (public domain). All from Wikimedia Commons.
