Trieste in this period, like the cities of Lombardy and the Veneto, is more Italian than Austrian architecturally. As a result it outshines Vienna in the extent and the quality of its early nineteenth-century construction. The new buildings were largely concentrated around the Canal Grande, a rectangular lagoon extending inland from the Riva Tre Novembre. At the head of this rises Sant’ Antonio di Padova, built by Nobile in 1826-49, long after this former Trieste City Architect had been called to Vienna as head of the architecture section of the Akademie there. Occupying a position somewhat similar to that of the Gran Madre di Dio in Turin, Nobile’s church is considerably more interesting, particularly as regards the generous spatial organization of the interior. The Canal Grande is flanked by contemporary palaces that are harmonious with one another in scale but quite varied in detail. The largest and finest, facing the sea on the left, is the Palazzo Carciotti. This was completed in 1806 by Matthäus Pertsch, a Milan-trained architect who had provided in 1798 the façade of the Teatro Verdi here in Trieste. With its raised portico and small dome, the Palazzo Carciotti is one of the most prominent and successful Italian buildings of the opening years of the century. At the other side of the Latin world, the Iberian peninsula participated rather less than the Italian in the advanced architectural movements of the first half of the century. In Madrid the Obelisk of the 2nd of May, built by Isidro Gonzalez Velasquez (1764/5-?) in 1822-40, and the Obelisk of La Castellana (1883), by Francisco Javier de Mariateguí, are rather modest specimens of a widely popular sort of erection compared to Smirke’s gigantic Wellington Testimonial in Dublin or Mills’s Washington Monument. The Palace of the Congress of 1843-50 by Narciso Pascual y Coloner (1808-70) is a dull example of that nineteenth-century Classicism that hardly deserves the qualification ‘Romantic’. Italians, little employed elsewhere out of their own country in this period, provided the principal new public edifices of Lisbon. F. X. Fabri (?-1807) built the Palace of Arzuda, begun in 1802, and Fortunato Lodi (1806-?) the Garret Theatre more than a generation later in 1842-6; both are as uninspired as the contemporary monuments of Madrid. As late as 1867-75 the Municipal Chamber of Lisbon by the local architect Domingos Ponente da Silva (1836-1901) maintained the Classical mode at its most conventional. Already, with the establishment of the Braganza headquarters in Rio de Janeiro early in the century, Portuguese vitality was passing to the New World (see Chapter 5). Yet if Lisbon has no individual Romantic Classical monuments of much interest, the lower city, extending from the Praça do Commercio to O Rocio, is a splendid example of late-eighteenth-century urbanism, initiated after the earthquake of 1755 by Eugenio dos Santos de Carvalho (1711-60).