Duino Aurisina

The comune was born in 1928 from the suppression of five comuni: Duino, Aurisina, Malchina, San Pelagio and Slivia. It took the names of the two largest and put the town hall in a suburb of Aurisina called Cave. Here every place has two names, because the Slovene minority is substantial: Devin-Nabrežina, Šempolaj, Mavhinje, Slivno; and Aurisina itself was called Nabresina until the fascist period. It is a border corner in the administrative sense as well: from 1947 to 1954 it belonged to zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste and returned to the Italian Republic on the twenty-sixth of October 1954, and although it lies in the province of Trieste the whole territory depends on the archdiocese of Gorizia.

The stone of Aurisina was already being cut by the Romans, and served to build Aquileia and the most important Roman monuments of Ravenna: the quarry is still called the Roman Quarry. It was reopened when the railway from Vienna to Trieste arrived in 1857, and that line changed everything: Aurisina became a junction of the first importance for traffic between Italy and central Europe, and the comune, which until then had lived on poor subsistence farming, became a land of immigration — workers arrived from the Karst and from Friuli. The rest is karst and sea: the resurgences of the Timavo, the cliffs with a path that bears the name of Rilke, the caves. In one of these, the rock shelter of Visogliano, five teeth and a fragment of jawbone have been found and attributed to Homo heidelbergensis; at the Villaggio del Pescatore they have found a dinosaur. And at Duino, in 1906, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life.