a codex to conjure

The Codex was purchased in 1980 by wealthy industrialist and art collector Armand Hammer from the Leicester estate, and renamed the Codex Hammer.

In 1994, Bill Gates bought it at an auction for US$30.8 million, making it the most expensive book ever sold, and he subsequently renamed it the Codex Leicester.

The Codex is put on public display once a year in a different city around the world. In 2004, it was exhibited in the Château de Chambord, and in 2005 in Tokyo. One page was exhibited at the Seattle Museum of Flight's 2006 exhibit "Leonardo da Vinci: Man, Inventor, Genius." From June to August 2007, the codex was the centerpiece of a two-month exhibition hosted by the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland.

After Gates acquired the Codex, he had its pages scanned into digital image files, some of which were later distributed as screen saver and wallpaper files on a CD-ROM. A comprehensive CD-ROM version (simply titled Leonardo da Vinci) was released by Corbis in 1997.

The Codex Atlanticus (Atlantic Codex) is an important, twelve-volume, bound set of drawings and writings by Leonardo da Vinci, the largest such set; its name indicates its atlas-like breadth. It comprises 1,119 pages dating from 1478 to 1519, the contents covering a great variety of subjects, from flight to weaponry to musical instruments and from mathematics to botany. This codex was gathered by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, son of Leone Leoni, in the late 16th c., although Leoni dismembered some Leonardo notebooks in its formation. It is currently preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

The codex was restored and rebound by the Basilian monks working in the Laboratory for the Restoration of Ancient Books and Manuscripts of the Exarchic Greek Abbey of St. Mary of Grottaferrata over the course of 1968 to 1972.

In April 2006, Carmen Bambach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York discovered an extensive invasion of molds of various colors, including black, red, and purple, along with swelling of pages.Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, then the head of the Ambrosian Library, now head of the pontifical Council for Culture at the Vatican, alerted the Italian conservation institute, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, in Florence. In October 2008, it was determined that the colors found on the pages weren't the product of mold, but instead caused by mercury salts added to protect the Codex from mold. Moreover, the staining appears to be not on the codex but on later cartonage.

Codex on the Flight of Birds is a relatively short codex of circa 1505 by Leonardo da Vinci. It comprises 18 folios and measures 21 × 15 centimetres. Now held at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy, the codex begins with an examination of the flight behavior of birds and proposes mechanisms for flight by machines. Da Vinci constructed a number of these machines, and attempted to launch them from a hill near Florence. However, his efforts failed.

In the codex, Da Vinci notes for the first time that the center of gravity of a flying bird does not coincide with its center of pressure.

The Codex Trivulzianus is a manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci that originally contained 62 sheets, but today only 55 remain. It documents Leonardo's attempts to improve his modest literary education, through long lists of learned words copied from authoritative lexical and grammatical sources. The manuscript also contains studies of military and religious architecture.

The Codex Trivulzianus is kept at Sforza Castle in Milan, Italy, but is not normally available to the public. In the main museum a room also contains frescos painted by Leonardo.

The Vitruvian Man is a world-renowned drawing created by Leonardo da Vinci around the year 1487. It is accompanied by notes based on the work of the famed architect, Vitruvius Pollio. The drawing, which is in pen and ink on paper, depicts a male figure in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and simultaneously inscribed in a circle and square. The drawing and text are sometimes called the Canon of Proportions or, less often, Proportions of Man. It is stored in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, Italy, and, like most works on paper, is displayed only occasionally.

The drawing is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise De Architectura. Vitruvius described the human figure as being the principal source of proportion among the Classical orders of architecture. Other artists had attempted to depict this concept, with less success. Leonardo's drawing is traditionally named in honor of the architect

This image exemplifies the blend of art and science during the Renaissance and provides the perfect example of Leonardo's keen interest in proportion. In addition, this picture represents a cornerstone of Leonardo's attempts to relate man to nature. Encyclopaedia Britannica online states, "Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body he had produced through his anatomical drawings and Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm). He believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe."

According to Leonardo's preview in the accompanying text, written in mirror writing, it was made as a study of the proportions of the (male) human body as described in Vitruvius:

"palmus autem habet quattuor digitos"

a palm is the width of four fingers

a foot is the width of four palms (i.e., 12 inches)

a cubit is the width of six palms

a pace is four cubits

a man's height is four cubits (and thus 24 palms)

"erit eaque mensura ad manas pansas,"

the length of a man's outspread arms (arm span) is equal to his height

the distance from the hairline to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of a man's height

the distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin is one-eighth of a man's height

the distance from the bottom of the neck to the hairline is one-sixth of a man's height

the maximum width of the shoulders is a quarter of a man's height

the distance from the middle of the chest to the top of the head is a quarter of a man's height

the distance from the elbow to the tip of the hand is a quarter of a man's height

the distance from the elbow to the armpit is one-eighth of a man's height

the length of the hand is one-tenth of a man's height

the distance from the bottom of the chin to the nose is one-third of the length of the head

the distance from the hairline to the eyebrows is one-third of the length of the face

the length of the ear is one-third of the length of the face

the length of a man's foot is one-sixth of his height

Leonardo is clearly illustrating Vitruvius' De architectura 3.1.2-3 which reads:

For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the under side of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under side of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown. Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole. Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centred at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.

The multiple viewpoint that set in with Romanticism has convinced us that there is no such thing as a universal set of proportions for the human body. The field of anthropometry was created in order to describe individual variations. Vitruvius' statements may be interpreted as statements about average proportions. Vitruvius takes pains to give a precise mathematical definition of what he means by saying that the navel is the center of the body, but other definitions lead to different results; for example, the center of mass of the human body depends on the position of the limbs, and in a standing posture is typically about 10 cm lower than the navel, near the top of the hip bones.

Note that Leonardo's drawing combines a careful reading of the ancient text with his own observation of actual human bodies. In drawing the circle and square he correctly observes that the square cannot have the same center as the circle, the navel, but is somewhat lower in the anatomy. This adjustment is the innovative part of Leonardo's drawing and what distinguishes it from earlier illustrations. He also departs from Vitruvius by drawing the arms raised to a position in which the fingertips are level with the top of the head, rather than Vitruvius's much lower angle, in which the arms form lines passing through the navel.

The drawing itself is often used as an implied symbol of the essential symmetry of the human body, and by extension, of the universe as a whole.

It may be noticed by examining the drawing that the combination of arm and leg positions actually creates sixteen different poses. The pose with the arms straight out and the feet together is seen to be inscribed in the superimposed square. On the other hand, the "spread-eagle" pose is seen to be inscribed in the superimposed circle.

The drawing was in the collection of Giuseppe Bossi, who illustrated it in his monograph on Leonardo's The Last Supper, Del Cenacolo di Leonardo Da Vinci libri quattro (1810). The following year he excerpted the section of his monograph concerned with the Vitruvian Man and published it as Delle opinioni di Leonardo da Vinci intorno alla simmetria de'Corpi Umani (1811), with a dedication to his friend Antonio Canova.

After Bossi's death in 1815 the Vitruvian Man was acquired, along with the bulk of his drawings, by the Accademia.

The Vitruvian Man is now used as a contemporary symbol of medical professionals and medical establishments. Many medical companies have adopted this artwork as the symbol of their group, company or organization, particularly in the United States, Saudi Arabia, India, and Germany.It has also come to represent alternative medicine and the holopathic approach to wellness.

The Vitruvian Man remains one of the most referenced and reproduced artistic images in the world today. The proportions for the human body, as proposed by Vitruvius, have inspired many other artists in drawing their version of the Vitruvian Man:

Cesare Cesariano (1521) who edited the important 1521 edition of “De Archtectura” of Vitruvius (Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to have provided the illustrations for this edition).

Albrecht Dürer (1528) in his book Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four books on human proportions)

Pietro di Giacomo Cataneo (1554)

Heinrich Lautensack (1618)

William Blake (1795) “Glad Day” (now known as "Albion rose"). This representation is without the circle and square.

Susan Dorothea White's version Sex Change for Vitruvian Man (2005)

As well as its use by the medical profession, the Vitruvian Man has been used in a variety of fictional and non-fictional media, for various symbolic purposes. For example, the image appears on the national side of Italian 1 euro coins, chosen by the Economy minister (and later President of the Italian Republic) Carlo Azeglio Ciampi for its high symbolic meaning of "man as a measure of all things".

A space-suited figure in the same superimposed poses of Vitruvian Man appears on a patch worn on the right shoulder of the American Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) space suit used by NASA. This patch, called the EVA patch, is also awarded to spacewalkers for use on uniform jumpsuits as an indicator that the individual has completed a spacewalk.

Stylized Vitruvian Man figures have been adopted for the icons representing accessibility in the Mac OS and Gnome desktop computer interfaces.

Particularly when used in fiction, the image of the Vitruvian Man is commonly modified to suit the setting by featuring a character, a skeleton or a non-human (such as a robot in science fiction or an animal). The easily-recognisable image lends itself to being referenced.

Trieste listen (Italian: Trieste, pronounced [tri-ste]) is a city and seaport in north eastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south, east and north of the city. Trieste is located at the head of the Gulf of Trieste and throughout history it has been influenced by its location at the crossroads of Germanic, Latin and Slavic cultures. In 2009 it had a population of about 205,000[1] and it is the capital of the autonomous region Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trieste province.

Trieste was part of the Habsburg Monarchy from 1382 until 1918. In the 19th century it was the most important port of one of the Great Powers of Europe. As a prosperous seaport in the Mediterranean region Trieste became the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (after Vienna, Budapest, and Prague). In the fin-de-siecle period, it emerged as an important hub for literature and music. However, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Trieste's annexation to Italy after World War I led to a decline of its economic and cultural importance and, throughout the Cold War, Trieste was a peripheral city.

Today, Trieste is a border town. The population is an ethnic mix of the neighbouring regions. The dominant local dialect of Trieste is called Triestine language ("Triestin" - pronounced [tristin]), a form of Venetian. This dialect and the official Italian language are spoken in the city centre, while Slovene is spoken in several of the immediate suburbs. The Triestin and the Slovene languages are considered autochthonous of the area. There are also small numbers of Serbian, Croatian, German, and Hungarian speakers.

The economy depends on the port and on trade with its neighbouring regions. Trieste is a lively and cosmopolitan city, with more than 7.7% of its population being from abroad, and it is rebuilding some of its former cultural, economic and political influence. The city is a major centre in the EU for trade, politics, culture, shipbuilding, education, transport and commerce. Trieste is also Italy and the Mediterranean's leading coffee port, the hometown of "Illy Caffè" and the supplier of more than 40% of Italy's coffee. The city is part of the "Corridor 5", which aims at ensuring a bigger transport connection between countries in Western Europe and Eastern European nations, such as Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Ukraine and Bosnia. This will be also a great impetus for a further boost to the economy of Trieste. Trieste is also home to some Italian mega-companies, such as Assicurazioni Generali, which was in 2005, Italy's 2nd and the world's 24th biggest company by revenue, after Hitachi and Carrefour

Trieste is situated on the extreme limit of the Italian northeast, near the border with the Slovenia, in the more northern part of high Adriatic and lies on the Gulf of Trieste. The urban territory is mostly built upon a hill side that becomes a mountain: it is situated at the foot of an imposing escarpment that from the Kras Plateau comes down abruptly towards the sea. The Kras heights, close to the city, reach an altitude of 458 meters (1,502 ft) above sea level. The territory of Trieste is composed of several different climatic zones according to the distance from the sea and/or elevation. The average temperatures are 6 °C (43 °F) in January and 24 °C (75 °F) in July. The climate can be severely affected by the Bora, a northern to north-eastern katabatic wind that can reach speeds of up to 200 kilometers per hour. Trieste also has the smallest province in Italy.

The area of what is now Trieste was settled by the Carni, an Indo-European tribe (hence the name Carnia) in about the 3rd millennium BC. Subsequently the area was populated by the Histri, an Illyrian people, who remained the main civilization until the 2000 BC, when the Veneti arrived.

From 177 BC Tergeste was under the Romans. It was granted the status of colony under Julius Caesar, who recorded its name as Tergeste in his Commentarii de bello Gallico (51 BC). The name Tergeste derived from the Venetic trg and este; Tergeste was defined an "Illyrian city" by Artemidorus of Ephesus, a Greek geographer, and "Carnic" by Strabo.

In imperial times the border was moved from Timavo to Formione (today Risano). The Roman Tergeste lived a flourishing period due to its position as a crossroad from Aquileia, the main Roman city in the area, and Istria, and as a port as well, some ruins of which are still visible. Augustus built a line of walls around the city in 33-32 BC.

In the Early Christian era it remained a flourishing center, and after the end of the Western Roman Empire (in 476), Trieste was a Byzantine military outpost. In 567 AD the city was destroyed by the Lombards, in the course of their invasion of northern Italy. In 788 it became part of the Frankish kingdom, under the authority of their count-bishop. From 1081 the city came loosely under the Patriarchate of Aquileia, developing into a free commune by the end of the 12th century.

After two centuries of war against the nearby major power, the Republic of Venice (which occupied it briefly from 1369 to 1372), the burghers of Trieste petitioned Leopold III of Habsburg, Duke of Austria to become part of his domains. The agreement of cessation was signed in October 1382, in St. Bartholomew's church in the village of Šiška (apud Sisciam), today one of the city quarters of Ljubljana. The citizens, however, maintained a certain degree of autonomy up until the 17th century.

Trieste became an important port and trade hub. In 1719, it was made a free port within the Habsburg Empire by Emperor Charles VI, and remained a free port until 1 July 1891. The reign of his successor, Maria Theresa of Austria, marked the beginning of a flourishing era for the city.

In 1768 the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann was murdered by a robber in Trieste, while on his way from Vienna to Italy.

Trieste was occupied by French troops three times during the Napoleonic Wars, in 1797, 1805 and in 1809. Between 1809 and 1813, it was annexed to the Illyrian Provinces, interrupting its status of free port and losing its autonomy. The municipal autonomy was not restored after the return of the city to the Austrian Empire in 1813. Following the Napoleonic Wars, Trieste continued to prosper as the Free Imperial City of Trieste (Reichsunmittelbare Stadt Triest), a status that granted economic freedom, but limited its political self-government. The city's role as main Austrian trading port and shipbuilding centre was later emphasized with the foundation of the merchant shipping line Austrian Lloyd in 1836, whose headquarters stood at the corner of the Piazza Grande and Sanità. By 1913 Austrian Lloyd had a fleet of 62 ships comprising a total of 236,000 tons. With the introduction of the constitutionalism in the Austrian Empire in 1860, the municipal autonomy of the city was restored, with Trieste became capital of the Adriatiches Kustenland, the Austrian Littoral region.

The particular Friulian dialect, called Tergestino, spoken until the beginning of the 20th century, was gradually overcome by the Triestine (the local variant partially similar of the Venetian dialect) and other languages, including German grammar, and standard Slovene and Italian languages. While Triestine was spoken by the largest part of the population, German was the language of the Austrian bureaucracy and Slovene was predominant in the surrounding villages. From the last decades of the 19th century, Slovene language speakers grew steadily, reaching 25% of the overall population of Trieste in 1911 (30% of the Austro-Hungarian citizens in Trieste). A small number of the population spoke Croatian (around 1% in 1911), and the city also counted several other smaller ethnic communities, namely Czechs, Serbs and Greeks, which mostly assimilated either to the Italian or Slovene-speaking community.

The modern Austro-Hungarian Navy used Trieste's shipbuilding facilities for construction and as a base. The construction of the first major trunk railway in the Empire, the Vienna-Trieste Austrian Southern Railway, was completed in 1857, a valuable asset for trade and the supply of coal.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste was a buzzing cosmopolitan city frequented by artists and pholisophes such as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Sigmund Freud, Dragotin Kette, Ivan Cankar, Scipio Slataper, and Umberto Saba. The city was the major port of the Austrian Riviera, an enclave, the only one very real part of Mitteleuropa on the south of Alps. Viennese architecture and coffeehouses still dominate the streets of Trieste to this day.

Together with Trento, Trieste was a main focus of the irredentist movement, which aimed for the annexation to Italy of all the lands they claimed were inhabited by an Italian speaking population. After the end of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, and many of its border areas, including the Austrian Littoral, were disputed among its successor states. On November 3, 1918, Trieste was occupied by the Italian Army, but was officially annexed to the Kingdom of Italy only with the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920. The region was reorganized under a new administrative unit, known as the Julian March (Venezia Giulia).

The fall to Italy , however, brought a loss of importance for the city, with the new state border depriving it of its former hinterland. The Slovene ethnic group (around 25% of the population according to the 1911 census) suffered persecution by rising Italian Fascism. The period of violent persecution of Austrian and Slovenes began on April 13, 1920, when a group of filo-Italian Fascists burnt the Narodni dom ("National House"), the community hall of Trieste's Slovenes. After the emergence of the Fascist regime in 1922, a policy of Italianization began: public use of Slovene language was prohibited, all Slovene associations were dissolved, names and surnames of Slavic and German origin were Italianized. Several thousand Slovenes from Trieste, especially intellectuals, emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and to South America, where many became prominent in their field. Among the notable Slovene emigés from Trieste were the writers Vladimir Bartol and Josip Ribičič, the legal theorist Boris Furlan, and the architect Viktor Sulčič.

In the late 1920s, Yugoslav irredentism started to appear, and the Slovene militant anti-fascist organization TIGR carried out several bomb attacks in the city centre. In 1930 and 1941, two trials against hundreds of Slovene activists were held in Trieste by the Special Tribunal for the Security of the State.

Despite the decline of the city's economic importance, the demise of its traditional multicultural and pluri-linguistic character, and emigration of many Slovene and big percentage of Austrian/German speakers, the overall population continued to grow. The Fascist Regime built several new infrastructures and public buildings, including the almost 70 m (229.66 ft) high Victory Lighthouse (Faro della Vittoria), which became one of the city's landmarks. The University of Trieste was also established in this period.

Several artistic and intellectual subcultures continued to swarm under the repressive Fascist regime. In the 1920s, the city was home to an important avant-gardist movement in visual arts, centred around the futurist Tullio Crali and the constructivist Avgust Černigoj. In the same period, Trieste consolidated its role as one of the centre of modern Italian literature, with authors such as Umberto Saba, Biagio Marin, Giani Stuparich, and Salvatore Satta. Among the non-Italian authors and intellectuals that remained in Trieste, the most notable were Julius Kugy, Boris Pahor and Stanko Vuk. Intellectuals were frequently associated with Caffè San Marco, a cafè in the city which remains open today.

After the constitution of the Italian Social Republic, on 23 September 1943, Trieste was nominally absorbed into this entity. The Germans, however, annexed it to the Operation Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, which included the whole Julian March, Friuli, the Province of Ljubljana, Gorski Kotar and the islands of Krk and Rab. The new administrative entity was headed by Friedrich Rainer. Under the Nazi occupation, the only concentration camp on Italian soil was built in a suburb of Trieste, at the Risiera di San Sabba, on 4 April 1944. The city saw a strong Italian and Yugoslav partisan activity, and suffered from Allied bombings.

On April 30, 1945, the Italian anti-Fascist National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, or CLN) of don Marzari and Savio Fonda, constituted of approximately 3,500 volunteers, incited a riot against the German occupiers. On May 1, Allied forces of the Yugoslav Partisans' 8th Corps arrived and took over most of the city, except for the courts and the castle of San Giusto, where the German garrisons refused to surrender to any force other than New Zealanders. The 2nd New Zealand Division continued to advance towards Trieste along Route 14 around the northern coast of the Adriatic sea and arrived in the city the next day (see official histories The Italian Campaign and Through the Venetian Line). The German forces capitulated on the evening of May 2, but were then turned over to the Yugoslav forces.

The Yugoslavs held full control of the city until June 12, a period known in the Italian historiography as the "forty days of Trieste" During this period, hundreds of locals were arrested by the Yugoslav authorities, and some of them disappeared. These included former Fascists and Nazi collaborators, but also Italian nationalists, and any other real or potential opponents of Yugoslav Communism. Some were interned in Yugoslav concentration camps (mostly in Borovnica, Slovenia), while others were allegedly murdered and thrown into the potholes ("foibe") on the Kras plateau.

After an agreement between the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito and the British Field Marshal Harold Alexander, the Yugoslav forces withdrew from Trieste, which came under a joint British-U.S. military administration. The Julian March was divided between Anglo-American and Yugoslav military administration until September 1947, when the Paris Peace Treaty established the Free Territory of Trieste.

In 1947, Trieste was declared an independent city state under the protection of the United Nations as the Free Territory of Trieste. The territory was divided into two zones, A and B, along the Morgan Line, established in 1945.

From 1947 to 1954, the A Zone was governed by the Allied Military Government, composed of the American "Trieste United States Troops" (TRUST), commanded by Major General Bryant E. Moore, the commanding general of the American 88th Infantry Division, and the "British Element Trieste Forces" (BETFOR), commanded by Sir Terence Airey, who were the joint forces commander and also the military governors. Zone A covered almost the same area of the current Italian Province of Trieste, except for four small villages south of Muggia which were given to Yugoslavia after the dissolution of the Free Territory in 1954. Zone B, which remained under the military administration of the Yugoslav People's Army, was composed of the north-westernmost portion of the Istrian peninsula, roughly between the coastal towns of Ankaran and Novigrad.

In 1954, the Free Territory of Trieste was dissolved. The vast majority of Zone A, including the city of Trieste, was ceded to Italy. Zone B became part of Yugoslavia, along with four villages from the Zone A - (Plavje, Spodnje Škofije, Hrvatini, and Jelarji), and was divided among the Socialist Republic of Slovenia and Croatia. The annexation of Trieste to Italy was officially announced on 26 October 1954.

The final border line with Yugoslavia, and the status of the ethnic minorities in the areas, was settled in 1975 with the Treaty of Osimo. This line is now the border between Italy and Slovenia.

During the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trieste became a leading European city in economy, trade and commerce, and was the fourth largest and most important centre in the Empire, after Vienna, Budapest and Prague. The economy of Trieste, however, fell into huge decline after the city's annexation to Italy after World War I and was a mainly peripheral city during the Cold War. However, since the 1970s, Trieste has had a huge economic boom, thanks to a significant commercial shipping business to the container terminal, steel works and an oil terminal. Trieste is also Italy, Mediterranean's and one of Europe's greatest coffee ports, as the city supplies more than 40% of Italy's coffee. Coffee brands, such as Illy, were founded and are headquartered in the city. Currently, Trieste is one of Europe's most important ports and centres for trade and transport, with Trieste being part of the "Corridor 5" plan, to create a bigger transport connection between Western and Eastern European countries. Also, nowadays, the Italian worldwide insurance company Assicurazioni Generali, is headquartered in the city, being in 2005 Italy's second biggest corporation after Eni, and the world's 24th greatest conglomerate for revenue, and 47th according to the Fortune Global 500 in 2009

As of April 2009, there were 205,507 people residing in Trieste, located in the province of Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, of whom 46.7% were male and 53.3% were female. Trieste had lost roughly 1/3 of its population since the 1970s, due to the crisis of the historical industrial sectors of steel and shipbuilding, a dramatic drop in fertility rates and fast population aging. Minors (children aged 18 and younger) totalled 13.78 percent of the population compared to pensioners who number 27.9 percent. This compares with the Italian average of 18.06 percent (minors) and 19.94 percent (pensioners). The average age of Trieste residents is 46 compared to the Italian average of 42. In the five years between 2002 and 2007, the population of Trieste declined by 3.5 percent, while Italy as a whole grew by 3.85 percent. However, in the last two years the city shown signs of stabilizing thanks to growing immigration fluxes. The crude birth rate in Trieste is only 7.63 per 1,000 one of the lowest in eastern Italy, while the Italian average is 9.45 births.

At the end of 2009, ISTAT estimated that there were 15,795 foreign born residents in Trieste, representing 7.7% of the total city population. The largest autochthonous minority are Slovenes, but there is also a large immigrant group from other Balkan nations (particularly nearby Croatia, Albania and Romania): 4.95%, Asia: 0.52%, and sub-saharan Africa: 0.2%. Serbian community consists of both autochthonous and immigrant groups. Trieste is predominantly Roman Catholic, but also has large numbers of Orthodox Christians due to the city's large migrant population from Eastern Europe and its Balkan influence.

The city's most spoken language is Italian though there are many Slovene, Venetian and Friulian language speakers. There are also groups of German and Hungarian speakers.

The Schloß Miramar was built between 1856 and 1860 from a project by Carl Junker working under Archduke Maximilian. The Castle gardens provide a setting of beauty with a variety of trees, chosen by and planted on the orders of Maximilian, that today make a remarkable collection. Features of particular attraction in the gardens include two ponds, one noted for its swans and the other for lotus flowers, the Castle annexe ("Castelletto"), a bronze statue of Maximilian, and a small chapel where is kept a cross made from the remains of the "Novara", the flagship on which Maximilian, brother of Emperor Franz Josef, set sail to become Emperor of Mexico. During the existence of the Free Territory of Trieste, the castle served as headquarters for the United States Army's TRUST force.

Designed on the remains of previous castles on the site, it took almost two centuries to build. The stages of the development of the Castle's defensive structures are marked by the central part built under Frederick III (1470-1), the round Venetian bastion (1508-9), the Hoyos-Lalio bastion and the Pomis, or "Bastione fiorito" dated 1630

Arch of Riccardo (33 BC). It is a Roman gate built in the Roman walls in 33. It stands in Piazzetta Barbacan, in the narrow streets of the old town. It's called Arco di Riccardo ("Richard's Arch") because is believed to have been crossed by King Richard of England on the way back from the Crusades.

Basilica Forense (2nd century)

Palaeochristian basilica

Roman Age Temples" : one dedicated to Athena, one to Zeus, both on the S.Giusto hill.

The temple dedicated to Zeus ruins is next to the Forum , the Athenas is under the basilica, visitors can see his basement .

Trieste or Tergeste, which probably dates back to the protohistoric period, was enclosed by walls built in 33–32 BC on Emperor Octavian’s orders. The city developed greatly during the 1st and 2nd centuries.

The Roman theatre lies at the foot of the San Giusto hill, facing the sea. The construction partially exploits the gentle slope of the hill, and much of the theatre is made of stone. The topmost portion of the amphitheatre steps and the stage were supposedly made of wood.

The statues that adorned the theatre, brought back to light in the 1930s, are now preserved at the Town Museum. Three inscriptions from the Trajan period mention a certain Q. Petronius Modestus, someone closely connected to the development of the theatre, which was erected during the second half of the 1st century.

In the whole Trieste province, there are 10 speleological groups out of 24 in the whole Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. The Trieste plateau (Altopiano Triestino), called Kras or the Carso and covering an area of about 200 km² within Italy has approximately 1500 caves of various sizes. Among the most famous are the Grotta Gigante, the largest tourist cave in the world, with a single cavity large enough to contain St Peter's in Rome, and the Cave of Trebiciano (350 m (1,148.29 ft) deep) at the bottom of which flows the Timavo River. This river dives underground at Škocjan Caves in Slovenia (they are on UNESCO list and only a few kilometres from Trieste) and flows about 30 km before emerging about 1 km from the sea in a series of springs near Duino, reputed by the Romans to be an entrance to Hades.