During festivities in the autumn of 1954 celebrating the reunification of Trieste with Italy, the beautiful three-masted Italian Navy training ship Amerigo Vespucci, designed in the style of a late-18th century ship-of-the-line, was berthed in the city's harbour. Antonio Santin, Bishop of Trieste, was among those admiring the sailing ship, listening to high-flown speeches, watching brass-tinged military parades and, this being Italy, attending Mass.
Explore the Sanctuary of Monte Grisa in Trieste
In the darkest days at the end of the Second World War, when Trieste was occupied by Nazi troops and threatened on one side by the Allies and on the other by Marshall Tito's Yugoslavian partisans, Santin had feared the worst for his city. If, however, he prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary to intercede on Trieste's behalf and the city was spared further death and destruction, he would build a church in her honour.
And here it is: the Sanctuary of Monte Grisa, an astonishing 40m-high, sliced-and-truncated pyramid assembled from a host of concrete triangles, forming a highly stylised ship of sorts, its lofty ‘sails' raised 330m above the shoreline of the Gulf of Trieste on the north-west hem of the city. The view from the balcony deck of this pilgrimage church, built between 1959-1966, is soul-stirring: an azure sea in front, Trieste below to your left, and as you turn, the mountainous ridge and rolling vineyards – Prosecco country – separating this narrow strip of coastal Italy from Slovenia.
The sanctuary's architect, Antonio Guacci, professor at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at Trieste University, thought of it this way, too; arranging the high altar as ‘the bridge of command', and the lower church and its chapels as a capacious ‘hold'. Far from whimsical, this ship of souls is realised in the severest and most insistent manner, the tiers of triangles forming the structure both inside and out, above and below. They also provide virtually the only decoration to be found here. But what decoration! Aided and abetted by the imaginative young Roman engineer Sergio Musmeci, Guacci composed a structure that, alert to ever-changing plays of daylight and shadows, is a special work of art of its own.
Inside, the church is resolutely open, and although your eyes are drawn principally to the main altar, its complex play of space and structure encourages them to wander. Shipshape, the sanctuary is thoroughly well built, with fine shuttered concrete walls, convincing detail and gleaming marble floors. Settled here, you soon see that the hundreds of internal-external concrete triangles form star-like hexagons, as well as tracing the letter M, signifying both Mary and ‘Maris', as in the ancient hymn sung in Italian churches, Ave Stella Maris (Hail, Star of the Sea).
The only decoration throughout the building comes in the shape of triangular elements, such as the wall lighting and concrete columns of the lower church
The symbolism seems interminable. The honeycomb structure of the upper church can look like a beehive: the Virgin Mary, Santin told Guacci, is like a queen bee. Perhaps. Below, in the streets of Trieste, the church is still referred to, in local dialect, as ‘el formaggin' after the wrapped triangular cheese portions found in schoolchildren's lunch boxes. Ships, beehives, cheese portions, these references somehow help to warm the glacial face and cool geometry of this uncompromising design. It is hard not to liken it to other objects and buildings; from afar, it's reminiscent of the RAF's early warning missile detection and tracking station, an austere truncated pyramid much the same height as the sanctuary and brooding, since 1992, at Fylingdales high on the North Yorkshire Moors.
The bishop, his architect and engineer shaped this enigmatic building at a time when the church, society and architecture were changing in sudden, unexpected and experimental ways. For the Catholic church, this was an opportunity to engage with the modern world and to open up to its congregations who were, following the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, to be far more involved than they had been before in church ritual; church architecture would respond with an openness of plans, ‘noble simplicity' and minimal visual distraction. The Sanctuary of Monte Grisa was ahead of the curve.
Although stern, the church is welcoming. Services aside, of which there are many, its terrace becomes a popular spot, on the second Sunday of each October, to watch the Barcolana regatta, featuring as many as 3,000 boats of all classes sailing in the Gulf below. Those perched here in October 2024 would have seen the Amerigo Vespucci returning to Trieste for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the city's reunification with Italy. The following June, the church designated the ship a site of ‘sacred pilgrimages'; another is, of course, this monumental, mathematical, sentinel-like modern Marian church set high in full architectonic sail above the Gulf of Trieste.