Miramare Castle

Miramare is the house of a man who wanted to be a sailor and ended as an emperor in front of a firing squad. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, younger brother of Franz Joseph of Austria and from 1854 commander of the Imperial Navy, chose a bare limestone spur on the Gulf of Trieste for his home; local tradition says he found it while sheltering from a storm in the little harbour of Grignano. The Austrian architect Carl Junker drew the plans in 1856 and the building was finished in 1860, a white eclectic castle that seems to rise straight out of the Adriatic. In 1864 Maximilian left it to become Emperor of Mexico, and in June 1867 he was executed in Mexico. He never lived to see the interiors complete.

Those interiors are the reason to come, because they survive almost as the couple arranged them, with mid-19th-century furniture and objects still in place; a photographic record the archduke commissioned made the arrangement possible to reconstruct. On the ground floor his bedroom and study copy the cabin and stern wardroom of the frigate Novara, the warship that circumnavigated the globe in 1857 to 1859 under his command. The library is lined floor to ceiling with books, and the archduchess Charlotte's rooms are hung with pale blue silk. Upstairs come the Throne Room, Chinese and Japanese drawing rooms, and a room of paintings by Cesare Dell'Acqua telling the story of Maximilian and Miramare. The Trieste craftsmen Franz and Julius Hofmann made the furnishings under the archduke's eye, and Mexican imperial eagles appear on coats of arms inside and on the stonework outside.

The park is as much of a creation as the house. Before 1856 the promontory was bare rock and scrub; Junker laid out some 22 hectares as an English-style garden, and within about ten years it was planted with cedars from Lebanon, North Africa and the Himalayas, firs from Spain, cypresses from California and Mexico, pines from Asia and America, a giant sequoia and ginkgo trees. Paths wind past ponds, greenhouses and the Castelletto, a smaller copy of the castle where the couple lived while the main house was built and where Charlotte stayed after returning from Mexico in 1866 and 1867. German, New Zealand, British and American forces used the estate as a headquarters until 1954; it reopened to the public in 1955.

Getting there

The castle is on the coast road between Barcola and Grignano, about 8 km from central Trieste. Trieste Airport (TRS) is roughly 24 km away. Miramare railway halt, built specially for the castle, lies on the line between Trieste and Monfalcone and is served by regional trains.