The floating baths of Trieste: a seaside history of the Habsburg 19th century

For over a century in Trieste, "going to the sea" meant something very precise: stepping onto a wooden platform anchored offshore, reaching it by small steamer or gangway, and bathing shielded by heavy curtains. Throughout the 19th century the floating baths were the elegant — and long the only tolerated — way to enjoy the Adriatic without leaving the city. Their story begins with a ban, crosses the Habsburg golden age, and ends in a single stormy night.

Long before the bathing establishments appeared, the habit of a quick dip — the tociada — was already rooted in local life. On sweltering summers, sailors and boys from the Old Town plunged into the Canal Grande, dodging the sailing ships. The Habsburg authorities disapproved: an 1809 notice forbade bathing naked between the lazarettos, threatening arrests and, for the young, corporal punishment.

The Trieste that longed for the sea

In the second half of the 1800s the rise of the European bourgeoisie brought a new idea — leisure time, hours set aside for pleasure. For a cosmopolitan port and prosperous commercial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the sea became a place of health and recreation, not only of trade.

One practical problem remained: the city quays were crowded with piers, warehouses and steamers, and the water near the docks was hardly inviting. The clever, distinctly Triestine solution was to move the establishment offshore, onto a floating structure moored a few dozen metres out. According to local tradition, the very phrase "going to the bath" was born from these structures.

The science of salt water: thalassotherapy and Doctor Guastalla

The bathing craze had medical roots. Across Europe, thalassotherapy had been launched by the English physician Richard Russell, who as early as the mid-18th century recommended sea water both for bathing and as a curative drink.

In Trieste the cause found a passionate champion in the physician Augusto Guastalla (1810–1876), regarded as a forerunner of local naturism and hygienism. In 1842 he published in Milan the treatise Studii medici sull'acqua di mare, defending the benefits of immersion — strictly in cold, natural water, never warm — and of swimming against rheumatism, scrofula and other ailments. For Guastalla the sea was an open-air pharmacy, and the floating baths became its treatment rooms.

The Soglio di Nettuno (1823): the first floating bath in Italy

The ban on free bathing was elegantly circumvented. On 24 May 1823, anchored before the "Sanità" off piazza Giuseppina (today piazza Venezia), the Soglio di Nettuno opened: the city's — and reputedly Italy's — first floating bathing establishment. The invention was the work of the wealthy merchant Domenico D'Angeli, father of the future mayor Massimiliano, who in April 1823 had submitted his design for "sea baths by means of a floating edifice", obtaining a five-year patent.

It was a stately wooden building set on a raft borne by barrels and caissons, reached by boat or along a gangway walked by distinguished gentlemen and ladies in long gowns. On board was every comfort of the age:

• private cabins for changing and for warm freshwater baths;
• a café with drinks, beer and newspapers;
• aquarium tanks displaying the gulf's flora and fauna;
• even a room reserved for smokers.

Such was its fame that on 13 June 1832 it was visited by Emperor Francis I himself. The comfortable, fashionable floating model was now destined to multiply.

The golden age: from the Boscaglia-Buchler to the Bagno Maria

Riding the success, a small fleet of establishments flourished along the Trieste shore. Around 1830, before Piazza Grande (today piazza Unità d'Italia), the Bagno Galleggiante Boscaglia opened, a dismountable wooden structure reached by a dedicated steamer. From 1868 it passed to Maria, widow of Adolfo Buchler, who gave it the name by which it became famous — the Bagno Buchler — also called Galleggiante Nazionale. Later the owner Carlo Kozmann renewed it using, it is said, timber salvaged from the wreck of the French frigate Danae, sunk at Trieste in 1812. It was the longest-lived in the gulf, active for over eighty years.

The peak of luxury and local engineering came with the Bagno Maria, launched on 15 May 1858 by the new Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino at the San Rocco yard. It was the first floating bath supported by an iron structure: a platform of about 50 by 26 metres resting on watertight metal tubes, designed by the engineer Lorenzo Furian and financed by the entrepreneurs Pietro Chiozza and Francesco Carlo Ferrari. More than a bath, a true floating hotel: an elegant café, gymnastics and swimming masters, dinners with small orchestras and fireworks. Towed in summer near the molo Audace, it chiefly served the refined clientele of the nearby Hotel de la Ville.

The phenomenon did not stop there. In 1890, at the root of the Teresian pier, the Bagno Fontana opened, an elegant fee-paying establishment promoted by Carlo Ottavio Fontana and linked to the centre from 1896 by a horse-drawn tramway. A few years later, on 12 June 1899, the maritime entrepreneur Giacomo Sauro (1852–1922), father of the hero Nazario, had the floating San Giusto launched at Capodistria, moored at various points of the gulf and reached by nimble steamers.

Society at the baths: class, modesty and the separation of the sexes

Boarding a floating bath was not merely a matter of hygiene: it was a social gesture. Habsburg bathing was shaped by Victorian modesty. Women's bathing dress was fully covering — outfits with short alpaca trousers, belts, hats, sometimes even gloves — and etiquette imposed a rigid separation of the sexes.

The earliest baths used separate hours for men and women; modern structures like the Bagno Maria instead adopted separate pools, allowing the unprecedented simultaneous presence of both sexes, well divided and shielded from the harbour's gaze by heavy curtains lowered along the edges. Choosing the Buchler or the elegant Maria signalled wealth and status, and those floating baths became drawing rooms for local elites and northern European tourists.

The less affluent, meanwhile, stayed ashore. Those who could not pay lay on the great rocks outside the piers — called in dialect "le cape" — enjoying the sea for free, but exposed to fines and the protests of strolling worthies. Towards the end of the century free public baths also appeared, a sign of a city beginning to question everyone's right to the sea.

The end of an era: the 1911 storm and the legacy of the Ausonia

For all their elegance, the rafts remained at the mercy of the sea. The golden age of the floating baths ended traumatically in the night between 13 and 14 June 1911 — some sources say between the 14th and 15th — when a storm of extraordinary violence struck the Trieste shore. Chronicles of the time tell of waves six or seven metres high sweeping piers and vessels: the historic Bagno Buchler was the first to give way, breaking apart and scattering the sea with beams and barrels. Almost every other wooden structure was destroyed, and the already worn Bagno Maria ended its long life in those years.

Trieste did not rebuild its floating baths. The vast harbour land-reclamation works of the early 20th century and changing tastes shifted preferences towards fixed beaches and modern shore establishments. The legacy of that swimming culture flowed, in the 1930s, into the Stabilimento Balneare Ausonia, built in concrete with cutting-edge techniques near the former military bath: a farewell to wood and rafts, but also proof that the bond between Trieste and sea-bathing, born a century earlier with the Soglio di Nettuno, was now unbreakable.

Today almost nothing survives of the floating baths but a few yellowed photographs and the memory of a season when, to bathe, the people of Trieste literally climbed onto a stage upon the water.