Largo Barriera Vecchia — for Triestines simply Barriera — is one of Trieste's most significant historic places: a hinge between the city centre and the working-class districts, its names and transformations tell two and a half centuries of city history, from the Habsburg customs barrier to the Fascist urban plan of 1936.
The Customs Barrier and the Origin of the Name
The name comes from the customs barrier that marked the entrance to the city here: until 1779 this was the site of the old customs house, where carts and goods paid duty before entering Trieste. In that year the customs post was moved to the head of the new Commercial Road to Germany — and that new gate took the name of Barriera Nuova (New Barrier), making the original barrier "old". The old gate did not disappear at once: it remained active as an office for the collection of duties and tolls until 1849, when it was moved to Via dell'Istria. Since then the place name Barriera Vecchia has identified this area, which had meanwhile become a junction of the expanding city.
The Stream and the Via del Torrente
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the area was crossed by a stream that ran down towards the sea along the axis of today's Via Carducci — called, not by chance, Via del Torrente (Stream Street) until 1907, when it was named after the recently deceased poet. The covering of the watercourse in the stretch of the largo was already planned in 1857: its canalisation allowed the urban welding of the Barriera with the nineteenth-century town. A few steps further north, the adjacent Piazza Garibaldi was born of the same geography of waters and customs posts.
The Nineteenth Century: Cafés, Buildings and Barriera Life
During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, Largo Barriera Vecchia was a place of passage and gathering, with eclectic buildings reflecting Trieste's cosmopolitanism under the Austro-Hungarian Empire:
- The Byzantine House (Casa Sardotsch): built in 1875 by Raffaele Vicentini, home to a celebrated city café and cultural meeting point.
- The building at Largo Barriera Vecchia 6 (Casa Caccia): dated 1862, among the surviving nineteenth-century architectural examples.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the area was frequented by the literary figures of great Trieste: Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba and James Joyce, who stayed nearby during the years of the gestation of Ulysses.
Piazza dell'Impero: 1936
With the Fascist urban renewal plan, in 1936 the area changed face: the demolition of the blocks between Via dell'Arcata (today Via Carducci) and Barriera Vecchia made way for Piazza dell'Impero (Empire Square), inaugurated on 28 October 1936 in the presence of Duke Amedeo d'Aosta. The straightening of streets and the elimination of entire nineteenth-century buildings radically altered the architectural and social fabric, erasing historical testimonies regretted today.
After the Second World War, by presidential decree of 6 July 1946, the square returned to its nineteenth-century name of Largo Barriera Vecchia, which identifies it to this day.
The Twentieth Century
In the twentieth century the neighbourhood was one of the hearts of working-class Trieste:
- the Alabarda and Massimo cinemas;
- historic shops such as the Paradiso della Seta;
- the coach station, demolished in 1984.
Today Largo Barriera Vecchia retains its character as a commercial and cultural crossroads between the historic centre and the district of San Giacomo: a place whose very name — Barriera — still tells of the gateway function that created it.