Free Territory of Trieste
— — a country that lasted seven years.
Not only on a wall.
“A small country on the Adriatic, drawn on the maps from 1947 to 1954 and then quietly folded back in. Trieste was its capital, a port city where Italian, Slovene, and German still cross at café tables. The Karst plateau lifts behind the harbour. The bora comes down off it in winter and clears the sky for a week at a time.
Free Territory of Trieste, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Free Territory of Trieste existed as a sovereign entity from 1947 to 1954, established under the Treaty of Peace with Italy and divided into two zones: Zone A around the city of Trieste under Anglo-American administration, and Zone B along the Istrian coast under Yugoslav administration. The London Memorandum of 5 October 1954 returned Zone A to Italian civil administration and confirmed Zone B as Yugoslav. The city today sits in the autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia at the head of the Adriatic, close to the Slovenian border.
The capital city was built in stone by Habsburg Vienna, which made it the Empire's only deep-water Mediterranean port from the eighteenth century until 1918. Piazza Unità d'Italia opens onto the Adriatic at the foot of the old city, the largest sea-facing square in Europe at roughly 12,280 square metres. Above it, on San Giusto hill, the eleventh-century cathedral and the Castello di San Giusto hold the old core. Miramare Castle, finished in 1860 for Archduke Maximilian, sits in white limestone on the headland four kilometres up the coast.
Trieste is shaped by the bora, a cold katabatic wind that falls off the Karst plateau behind the city. Gusts above 150 km/h have been recorded along the Molo Audace on the waterfront, and ropes are still strung along some of the older streets for pedestrians to hold during the strongest blows. The wind clears the Adriatic sky for days at a time and gives the harbour the hard winter light that the painters who passed through, Veruda and Bolaffio, kept returning to in canvas after canvas.