Duino Castle

Duino stands on the cliffs above the Gulf of Trieste, and the fortress begun there in 1389 replaced an older castle built by the Patriarch of Aquileia, whose ruins survive on a rocky spur above the sea. Accounts differ over who ordered the new work — Ugone di Duino, captain of Trieste, or the Wallsee family outright — but it was Ramberto di Walsee, brother of Ugone's first wife, who inherited the estate on Ugone's death and saw the fortress finished in the early decades of the fifteenth century.

In 1472 the lordship of Duino, and with it its castle, passed from the Wallsee to Emperor Frederick III, who installed Niklas Lueger — already captain under the Wallsee in 1452 — as his captain and administrator at Duino and on the Karst. Lueger's successors, Jurgen von Ellach and Kaspar Rauber, had already taken part in Trieste's resistance to a fierce Venetian siege in 1463. As imperial captains they strengthened the castle's defences against the new Turkish threat and against Venice and rebellious local nobles alike: in 1485 Erasmus Lueger, castellan of Predjama, attacked Trieste with two thousand Hungarian horsemen, who were driven off and pursued across the Karst by Rauber's forces. In 1514 Johann Hofer, a companion-in-arms of Maximilian I, received the captaincy of Duino from the imperial chamber as a hereditary pledge for having financed new fortifications of the castle of Trieste; in 1522 the lordship passed to the Duchy of Carniola.

The Hofer von Hoenfels line held Duino until it died out in 1587 with the death of Matthaeus Hofer, and the castle passed to his only two daughters, Ludovika and Maria Clara Orsa, who married in succession — one after the other's death — Count Raimondo della Torre di Valsassina; he took the Hofer name for himself, rendered in German as von Thurn-Hofer und Valsassina, and the castle stayed with that branch for more than 250 years. In 1849 Countess Theresa von Thurn-Hofer und Valsassina, the family's last direct descendant, married Prince Egon zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst; their fourth daughter, Marie, married Prince Alessandro von Thurn und Taxis of the Bohemian branch in Venice in 1875, bringing Duino to him as her dowry. Their son, born in 1881 and also named Alessandro, inherited the castle and was created Duke of Castel Duino by King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, taking Italian citizenship in 1923 under the surname Della Torre e Tasso for himself and his descendants.

Not the wealthiest branch of the Thurn und Taxis family, Alessandro and Marie supported artists and writers, among them the Austrian-Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Walking the cliffs near the castle in early 1912, Rilke said a voice called out the line "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" — "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?" — which he wrote down at once; within days he had drafted the first two of what became ten elegies, along with passages later folded into the others, including the opening of the tenth. Unable to continue for another decade, held back by depression and an existential crisis, he finished the sequence only in Switzerland, dedicating the Duino Elegies — now ranked among his most important work — to Princess Marie on their completion in February 1922.

At the end of the Second World War and in its aftermath, the castle served as headquarters of the British XIII Corps under Lieutenant-General Sir John Harding, part of the Allied Mediterranean theatre under Lieutenant-General Sir William Duthie Morgan. It has remained the property of the Thurn und Taxis family, held today by Alessandro and Marie's great-grandson, Prince Carlo Alessandro della Torre e Tasso, Duke of Castel Duino; most of the castle and grounds are open to the public as a museum and park, and part of the building has housed the United World College of the Adriatic since 1982.