30 years for the Conservation and the regeneration of the Old Port of Trieste

The urban regeneration of Porto Vecchio (Old Port) of Trieste - the historical commercial harbour of the Hapsburg Empire which became Italian after the WWI, which from the mid-19th century has occupied a significant part of the waterfront of the Adriatic city with its department stores and docks - today seems to be a well started process. Extended just under 700,000 mq. and with over 1,000,000 mc. of hangars, often of extraordinary architectural value, the Old Port of Trieste is one of the most important precincts of industrial maritime archeology in the Mediterranean, as well as a strategic area for the urban and economic revitalization of the city and its territory. The story that, after its almost total abandonment, involved this port takes place over several decades, during which it was in danger, in a first moment, its own conservation. This long period was characterized by the succession of numerous projects, often proposed by important architects and developers: from Kenzo Tange to Gino Valle, from Manuel de Solà Morales to Stefano Boeri, from Norman Foster to Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra. This paper, after a brief introduction explaining the genesis of Porto Vecchio, reads the history of these plans and projects in a diachronic way, and try some possible interpretations of their thirty-year vicissitudes. In this way, it presents the most recent urban and architectural innovations developed for the regeneration of the historical harbour waterfront of Trieste, linked to the strong will of the Municipality of Trieste and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage to respond to this difficult situation. The text also comments on the difficulties encountered operating in this context, and the more or less marked cleverness of the projects (older and more recent) to highlight the unexpressed potential of the place and to protect and enhance its historical memory.