Štanjel
Štanjel ( Italian San Daniele del Carso, German: St. Daniel in the Karst ) is a village in the municipality of Komen in western Slovenia .
history
Archaeological excavations confirm that the beginnings of Štanjel go back to the Hallstatt period. During this time a fortress ( castelliere ) was built on the Thurn hill , which was later captured and expanded by the Romans. The castle allowed the passage from the Karst into the Wippach valley to be controlled .
In the Middle Ages the fortress became an important trading post. On the surrounding terraces there was a settlement that was first mentioned in 1402 in the Görzer Urbar . The village was subordinate to the Counts of Görz , who had a defensive wall built to protect against the Ottomans in the 15th century .
After the death of the last Count of Gorizia , Leonhard von Görz (1440–1500), Štanjel passed into the possession of the Habsburgs and increasingly lost its importance as an important trading post. In 1508 the settlement was briefly occupied by the Republic of Venice .
The Count Cobenzl resided in Štanjel from the 16th to the 19th century, and their family members were among the diplomatic representatives of the Habsburgs. The aristocratic family converted the Štanjel castle into one of their residences and used the local church as a family burial site.
In 1906, Štanjel was made accessible by rail with the construction of the Karst Railway , which is the last part of the Transalpina . The Štanjels train station is located on the Karst plateau.
During the First World War , the village was occupied by the Austro-Hungarian army.
In the interwar period, the townscape was shaped by buildings by the architect Max Fabiani , who was also mayor of the town between 1935 and 1945.
During the Second World War , the castle and some adjoining houses were burned down by Yugoslav partisans. The reconstruction of the castle only began in the 1960s and has not yet been completed.
Ferrari garden
The Ferrari Garden is one of many works that the architect Max Fabiani left in Štanjel. It was created as the completion of the “Villa Ferrari”, a row of houses from the Middle Ages that Fabiani had renovated for the Trieste doctor Enrico Ferrari and his family after the First World War .
The park was gradually built, probably between 1925 and 1935. At that time, the desolate and steep terrain below the villa took on its present form. When designing the garden, which adapts ideally to the location and shape of the terrain, the architect used both traditional approaches typical of the Karst landscape (terrace, stone retaining walls, stairs, pergolas), as well as elements that actually had nothing to do with the Karst have in common, but which reflect the ideals of the time. The result was a viewing pavilion , an oval water basin with two islets and a “Venetian” bridge, an artificial grotto with a “Botticelli” shell and water fountains. The choice of materials was also innovative for the time. Most of the structures built are made of concrete , a material that began to gain acceptance only hesitantly after the First World War.
The real phenomenon of Fabiani's work, however, is less obvious. You can only understand it when you think of the eternal problem of the karst landscape: the constant lack of water. Fabiani installed a water pipe system in Štanjel, in which the traditional way of collecting rainwater was expanded with the help of a complex system of cisterns, water pipes, drainage and irrigation channels. This system already supplied the villa and the park with its own running water at the beginning of the last century, not only for the satisfaction of basic needs, but also for entertainment and decoration. The decadence of the water basin with its water fountains in the middle of the thirsty karst landscape only exists in appearance. The water basin served primarily as a water reservoir with which the garden and the fields in the sinkhole below the park were watered. In winter , ice was broken on the surface of the water and collected in the “ice grotto” below the viewing pavilion . Fabiani, architect and inventor , masterfully executed similar interweaving of form and function in the Ferrari Garden, although the plan for the complete design most likely only existed in his head and never on paper.
The Ferrari Garden was declared a cultural monument of national importance in 1999 because of its cultural, scenic, artistic-architectural, historical and other extraordinary properties .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Description board at the entrance to the Ferrari Garden
Web links
Coordinates: 45 ° 49 ' N , 13 ° 51' E