Two villas and a chalet above the gulf · Trieste

In November 1913 the engineer Robert Lutz, from a Swiss family, bought a plot at Santa Croce sloping down to the sea and built two houses and a few outbuildings on it, in masonry and in timber: the Pensione Santa Croce. Vegetarian food, plenty of fruit, no alcohol, and guests could sleep in the open air. The period view and a view taken today from the same side of the slope show that the two houses and the chalet are still there.

Period view of the Pensione vegetariana Santa Croce

Period view “Pensione vegetariana Santa Croce”, author and date not established, source of the scan to be clarified; enlarged without generative models.

The two villas, the chalet and the pavilion seen from a drone

Real drone photograph, March 2025, no other retouching: we only blurred a person in the doorway.

Robert Lutz, an officer and engineer of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, marries Hede von Trapp, sister of the commander Georg von Trapp. The marriage was later dissolved.

Lutz buys a plot at Santa Croce running down to the sea, close to the station: he will make it a guesthouse.

He builds two houses, first the one towards Trieste, then the renovated villa, and the outbuildings: a chalet, a garden cabin and a workshop. The guesthouse follows the principles of the Zurich physician Bircher-Benner: fruit, cereals, raw food, no alcohol, and grape juice made on site.

The coast road is opened. Until then guests came by train: the Santa Croce station, closed in 2002, is little more than a hundred metres away.

A leaflet printed in Trieste describes it as “facing the open sea and the new coast road”: season from March to October, a weekend package, camp beds on the covered terraces.

The heirs sell the part with the first house: since then the two houses have had different owners. Today the two houses and the chalet still stand on the same slope.

Printed leaflet, Trieste, 1935 (printer's date, last digit uncertain)

Advertising card, probably 1930s, undated

Sources: the two original leaflets and the papers kept by the owner, the 2014 deed of sale (it records a 1975 easement in favour of plots in land-register entry 442, the entry that, according to the 2006 note, Lutz bought in 1913), the Neue Deutsche Biographie for the 1901 marriage, Il Piccolo of 8 August 2023. The order in which the two houses were built and the 1993 sale come from recollections gathered in 2006. The leaflets are reproduced in full: given their age they are in the public domain.

Six public aerial photos, from the black-and-white survey of 1989 to the Region's flight of March 2017, laid on top of each other metre by metre. Drag the slider: one year dissolves into the next, and the hillside changes around the house.

Black and white: the house is already there, between the Strada Costiera and the railway.

Black-and-white orthophoto, flown in 1989 («1988-89» series) · Italian National Geoportal, Ministry of the Environment (CC BY 4.0)

Above the house the dry-stone terraces can be read one by one; out at sea, rows of buoys.

Black-and-white orthophoto, flown in 1997 («1994-98» series) · Italian National Geoportal, Ministry of the Environment (CC BY 4.0)

The first colour flight: the clay-tile roofs, the green of the terraces and of the woods above the railway.

Colour orthophoto, flown in 1998 («2000» series) · Italian National Geoportal, Ministry of the Environment (CC BY 4.0)

The terraces around the house are cultivated, one after another, up to the railway.

Colour orthophoto, flown in 2007 («2006» series) · Italian National Geoportal, Ministry of the Environment (CC BY 4.0)

The green covers almost all the terrace walls: from above, only the roofs and the road stand out.

Colour orthophoto, flown in 2011 («2012» series) · Italian National Geoportal, Ministry of the Environment (CC BY 4.0)

March: the still-bare trees let the terrace walls above and beside the house show through again.

True orthophoto 2017-2020, flown 12-29 March 2017 · Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia (CC BY 4.0)

Real photos: no generative model, only cropping, resampling to 0.5 m per pixel and alignment on the 2017 flight, which corrects shifts of a few metres between flights. Frame of 640 × 480 m, north at the top.

The true profile of the slope beneath the villa, from the village of Santa Croce down to the sea floor. The villa stands on flysch, layered sandstone and marl that crumbles into workable soil: the rock of the terraces. Above 200 metres the limestone of the Karst begins; under the sea the bottom slopes gently, to about 12 metres half a kilometre from the shore.

Palaeocene-Eocene, about 60-40 million years ago

Palaeocene-Early Eocene, about 65-50 million years ago

Late Cretaceous-Palaeocene, about 100-56 million years ago

Profile computed along the line perpendicular to the coast through the villa's terrace: land from the LiDAR survey of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region (1 m terrain model, 2009 flight), one point every 4 m; sea from the EMODnet Bathymetry sea-floor model (cells of about 115 m: between the shore and the first cell at sea the bottom is interpolated); surface rocks from the regional geological map; roads and railway from OpenStreetMap.

ARPA monitoring point between Santa Croce harbour and Aurisina, 250 m away: rated excellent in 2025 and 2026, six samples out of six within limits in 2026

«Miramare and Trieste coast» Biosphere Reserve

the villa lies in the transition zone of the MAB programme, Man and the Biosphere

a protected landscape since the decree of 20 April 1964; the regional landscape plan calls it a «farming mosaic of flysch, terraces and cultivated slopes»

that is where the Natura 2000 site «Karst areas of Venezia Giulia» begins; the villa already lies in the «Carso» Important Bird Area

The radar satellite that watched six days of Bora in 2003 lets us compare the coast stretch by stretch. Off Santa Croce, one to three kilometres from the shore, the wind over the sea was about a quarter weaker than off the Trieste Molo in the median, and it was weaker on five days out of six; off Barcola, Sistiana and Duino the signal is not stable. This is the wind over the sea: on land, along the coast road, nobody has ever measured it.

Wind over the sea: RADARSAT radar images of six Bora episodes in 2003 (26 January-16 February), from Signell et al., Journal of Geophysical Research 115, C04020 (2010), figure 10, in our reading of the colours: cells 1-3 km from the shore compared with the same off the Molo F.lli Bandiera. The direction of the Bora from the strongest gusts at the Molo F.lli Bandiera (ARPA FVG-OSMER, event reports 2020-2026): median 68°.

The house stands about twenty metres above the coast road and today you reach it on foot, up a stone stair of about 120 steps. Landscape approval has been obtained for two parking spaces at road level and a lift that removes the first flight. It is the first step, not the last: below, what changes and what is still missing.

The stone wall on the coast road and the stairs climbing to the house

Today: the wall on the coast road and the stairs up to the house. Real photograph, December 2025.

Project simulation: the stone lift tower and the parking area along the road

Indicative simulation of the project: materials, finishes and planting of the finished work may differ. The tall building in the background is not the villa.

Obtained for the two parking spaces and the lift. It is the precondition for building: on its own it is not enough.

Still to be filed with the municipality: the owner is working on it with his technical adviser.

That of whoever owns the existing stairs, where the lift arrives: in the drawings the first flights run over a plot owned by others, to be checked in the land register; that of the body managing the road, which is a regional road, to be updated or obtained; the structural design; and the planning check, which is the delicate point: parking and tower lie within the road's buffer strip, on an area the 2014 deed describes as not buildable.

Only after the previous steps, with builders chosen on quotation.

This is our estimate for the parking spaces and the lift together, not a quotation: it will have to be checked against builders' offers.

From the project drawings: height difference from the road to the terrace 20.44 m; first flight of 12 + 25 risers up to the landing at +6.40 m, where the lift arrives, in a tower about 10 m high clad in stone; two 5 × 2.5 m bays in line, at road level, on the villa's strip of land between the road and the wall. The other risers (about 85) are counted on the plan, not surveyed on site. The section is unrolled along the stairs: the first two flights rise parallel to the road.