Welcome to what was once the park of Villa Margherita. We are standing on the hill of Scorcola — one of the most panoramic in the city, and one of the most eventful. Once a place of battles with the Venetians in medieval times, it later became a center of trade. The street leading up to the villa is called Via Commerciale, one of the first to connect the Karst plateau to the city center. When Via Commerciale was opened in 1780, Scorcola began to thrive: what had once been a wooded slope slowly transformed into one of the most coveted residential quarters of Trieste’s cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.
The year 1856, when Villa Margherita was built, was also the year construction began on Miramare Castle. Trieste was still under Austrian rule, and these were the years in which modern, neoclassical Trieste took shape — neoclassical not only in style, but in spirit. In 1768, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the “priest of ideal beauty,” had died here, leaving to the Triestines “the inheritance of a true expiatory cult.” The villa’s project was initially assigned to Giovanni Andrea Berlam, the patriarch of a family of architects who would transform the face of the city. Between 1872 and 1889, the villa was owned by the renowned hydraulic engineer Giuseppe Mauser, a passionate collector of exotic plants that he proudly cultivated in the lush twelve-thousand-square-meter garden and the neo-Gothic greenhouse. His garden was so admired that it was visited by Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies, granddaughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.
In 1895, the villa passed to Luigi Cambiagio, a partner of the shipping company “Fratelli Currò,” and later, in 1925, to his daughter Margherita, to whom the villa is now dedicated. During the years between the two World Wars, the park became “a sort of Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a place slightly out of the world where one could lose oneself among apricot trees, chestnuts, and vines… and where, after September 8, 1943, many political refugees found shelter, in the name of a brotherhood that had become a family tradition.” This is how the villa appeared through the eyes of a young Paolo Rumiz, Margherita’s adopted nephew. But the dream was short-lived: the villa was first seized by the fascists, and in 1945 transformed into a headquarters by the New Zealand troops among the first to arrive in the city during the “Race for Trieste.”
The last illustrious guest to admire the villa in all its splendor — and to make it the unforgettable setting of Alice Psacaropulo’s wedding banquet in 1950 — was the painter and poet Cesare Sofianopulo, who was so enchanted that he dedicated a sonnet to it. In that sonnet he celebrated the arrival of a Greek family into a home whose serene façade, with its twin towers and its gentle smile of Ionic columns, seemed to embody that very promise:
Today, on the day of Beninchasa,
may the nuptial hymn resound again for you:
gentleness of a “Yes” on which rests
the good of Italy in a patriarchal home
where the memory of Hellas still remains.
It was, however, the final act of a chapter now closed forever. After the turbulent years of the Allied Military Government and the definitive return of Trieste to Italy, the park was subdivided and sold, giving way to the modern condominiums that now surround the villa — designed, incidentally, by Alice’s brother, Alessandro Psacaropulo. The once grand family home, organized as a typical bourgeois residence with its reception floor, noble floor, and servants’ quarters, was divided into private apartments — still inhabited today, including by the artist’s descendants, who kindly ask visitors to respect the intimacy of this place. The entrance to Alice’s house-museum is at the rear of the villa, where a red doorbell will open the doors to the Studio Psacaropulo.
