ABSTRACT
Edoardo Weiss was born on September 21, 1889 in Trieste, a place that has increasingly stood out as one of the high-points in world cultural history. Situated at the extreme northeast corner of today’s Italy, Trieste was originally a Roman garrison town, and later dominated by the Venetians during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From Edoardo Weiss’s “early years” he said he was interested in the natural sciences, and while still attending the gymnasium getting an education he made the decision to study medicine, already with an eye on eventually becoming a psychiatrist. Trieste was “the world’s seventh busiest port, and second in the Mediterranean after Marseilles,” ahead of both Genoa and Barcelona. Trieste could function that way thanks to Joseph II’s 1781 Patent of Toleration so that non-Catholics, including Lutherans, Calvinists and the Greek orthodox, were given formal tolerance.
