Piazza Brin and the Umberto Primo District

Piazza Brin is at the centre of the Umberto I district and was built towards the end of the 19th century in a housing programme that had become essential due to the huge increase in the population, subsequent to the Naval Arsenal construction works and after the latter entered into full service. A true and proper slum with wooden huts had in fact arisen together with the start of the works on the colossal Arsenal and also when the latter started up into service, without any hygienic services whatsoever causing the fatal cholera epidemic on 1884.
A great dormitory was erected with a capacity for 4,000 people,

located in the area between viale Amendola and via Gramsci, while the houses provided with all facilities were being designed and built, the latter being one of the first public housing schemes in Italy. With its strictly orthogonal shape, the Umbertino district is situated along the upper part of corso Cavour, between the railway station and Duca degli Abruzzi barracks. Piazza Brin is at the heart of this district, a clearly middle class style place with a concentration of the formal and aesthetic ambitions of this part of the city.
The council authorities had already left free spaces converging onto the piazza in 1885, leaving the construction of more aesthetically committed buildings to private enterprise. This zone had been a swamp up until the above date but was now reclaimed by banking up the earth excavated by the works on the Arsenal docks, so that it had been filled up and the site was now healthier.
The most elegant mansions in fact converge onto the square, for example palazzo Sabatini and palazzo Palladini, built to a project by Fortunato Zanazzo between 1898 and 1900 and standing at the sides of the church of Our Lady of Scorza, or again the five mansions closing in the square, all commissioned by the Bertonati family, businessmen headed at first by Cesare and then by his son Gaetano.

The church of Our Lady of Scorza, with a remarkable 17th century painting inside portraying The Education of the Virgin by Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari – the heart of the entire square, inherited the name of a lost religious building sacrificed to the needs of the Arsenal construction site.
A fountain by Mirko Basaldella stands at the centre of the square, begun in 1955, that is to say during an intense artistic period of the sculptor from Udine who had just finished the great gates to the Fosse Ardeatine mausoleum in Rome. It is a period particularly full of Mirko’s works, starting in the 40’s with his first post-cubist experiences: this is a time when he creates multi-material paintings and sculptures, where myth, always dear to him, re-emerges not with a naturalistic form but as a “fabled mythical spectre”. The decorations on the FAO building in Rome and the iron cross on the statue to the fallen for liberty in the concentration camp at Mauthausen, together with the Fosse Ardeatine gates, mentioned above, come immediately before the La Spezia monument.