Palazzo Viviani - Giberti (1906 - 1907)
viale XX Settembre
Arch. Giuseppe Sommaruga

The tragedy of the "Titanic", the monument to the train drivers of Porthmouth who perished in the sinking of the White Star transatlantic liner and two historic buildings from Trieste: Palazzo Viviani - Giberti, located in Viale XX Settembre of a cinema that today is called "Ambassadors" and Polish home, on the corner of Corso Italia and via Imbriani.
There is a thin red thread that connects the most disruptive tragedy of passenger transport by sea, the monument in memory of the drivers of the transatlantic and the two Trieste buildings: this thread was stretched by the fellow sculptor Romeo Rathmann, born in 1880 and passed on to another life on October 11, 1961. Exactly fifty years ago.
Few of Romeo Rathmann in our city remember works and life because oblivion has had the upper hand; the same happened in Great Britain where its statues and its high-reliefs ennobled buildings and monuments created by the "WhiteHead & Son" construction company. Among these, a bronze nymph, the central point of interest of the "Temperance Fountain", stolen a few decades ago. But also another statue modeled for the "London Postal Service War Memorial" which in 1920 was placed in the "King Edward Building" of the British capital.
"The memory of this great sculptor from Trieste has been lost," says the architect Francesco Fegitz who, like a detective of the past, has tried to reconstruct the life of Romeo Rathmann, by putting the works created and his places of residence and work. There are no direct heirs and the drawings, the models, have gone missing. At the moment, a photographic portrait has not emerged and even his ashes that had been placed in the London cemetery of Stratham Vale, according to the register of that cemetery, have disappeared.