Choose a bed and breakfast or a holiday house in the area of Rimembranza Park to visit the monumental area located on the hill of San Giusto in Trieste. You will have the opportunity to visit the Cathedral of San Giusto, the Castle of San Giusto, the propileum, the museum of history and art and the lapidary garden.
The asymmetrical cathedral facade, bare stone made, is magnificently adorned with a rosette from the end of '300: a circle of twelve double columns radially arranged from the center and alternately connected by rounded arches creates an elaborate gothic pattern. Around the fist circle a ring formed by 24 paired columns with pointed arches, which creates a fine tracery of trefoil arches and quadrifoglie rosettes. The jambs of the front door are made from a Roman funeral stele of Barbiasegata family divided in two parts and arranged in opposite directions in order to show in the external part the accurately finished sides. On the top of the door it is placed a plaque commemorating the damage suffered by the church in 1813 during the Austro-British bombing against Napoleonic troops barricaded in the castle: some cannon balls were stuck in the wall of the church and in the bell tower.
On the facade have been placed the busts of three bishops of Trieste: Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who later became Pope Pius II, Andrea Rapicio, humanist and Latin poet, and Rinaldo Scarlicchio, who discovered the bones of San Giusto. The bell tower that today looks like a square-built defence tower, is the reconstruction of the earlier Romanesque bell tower founded on the ruins of the Roman propileo which also incorporated part of the ornamental sculptures. Originally it ended with a sharp spire topped by a acroterion, the so called "melon", struck by lightning in 1421 and now preserved in the nearby Museum of History and Art.
Inside the cathedral we mention the mosaic of the apse representing Christ with the two saints from Trieste Giusto and Servolo, the central aisle with the fourteenth-century ceiling painted wood and precious marble floor.
Staying at a B&B on the San Giusto hill will allow you to relive the history of Trieste from Roman times to the Venetian domination.
