The faces of poverty in Trieste: redrawing the city's map

On September 8, in a packed Sala Tessitori, Caritas Diocesana Trieste presented the 2025 data from its Observatory in dialogue with the National Statistical Report. A discussion that proposed an alliance and a working style to meet and tackle local poverty.

In Trieste, poverty has a face. Or rather, it has the faces of many people. Those whom Caritas Diocesana Trieste was able to meet through its services during 2025 and who carry an increasingly complex and, very often, "invisible" poverty. This, and much more, emerged from the public discussion "The maps of poverty: data, faces, perspectives. Between national data and local readings." Before authorities, representatives of various entities and associations, volunteers, and citizens, the Bishop immediately emphasized in his opening how "speaking of the faces, of the stories of people experiencing poverty means recognizing their uniqueness and not treating them as a case to be dismissed with a subsidy. Through our services, people can feel heard. Their face is already an appeal."

The data from the Caritas Observatory on Trieste do not measure the entirety of poverty present in the area, but offer a partial, albeit indicative, view resulting from encounters with people who, during 2025, were intercepted by local Caritas services. In 2025, the "Sergio Peschier" Listening Center accompanied 882 individuals, a number that rises to 1,589 when considering households. The data show that poverty is now a structural, complex, and multidimensional phenomenon, marked by growing inequalities. The chronicity of need is also increasing: 13.5% of people have been under care for over five years. Faced with the rise in loneliness, the Bishop reiterated the urgency of forging "an alliance with institutions" and relaunching "the need for relationships."

Nationally, the over-65s encountered by Caritas services have grown by 191% in ten years, rising from 7.7% to 15.4% of total users. Loneliness confirms itself as a strong accelerator of poverty: in Trieste, one in three people welcomed at the Center is over 55, and 41.5% live alone. The housing emergency requires intervention in one out of three cases: 80% of people struggle to afford their housing costs, and 19% have no home at all. In 2025, Caritas allocated 27,919 euros for paying bills and 12,732 euros for rent subsidies. Added to this is work that no longer protects against hardship: 24% of those seeking help in Italy are employed, a figure highlighting the severe loss of families' purchasing power.

In her speech, Vera Pellegrino shared, alongside the data, some stories of the people met: "Like Luciano, a 55-year-old man who has always lived with his parents and hasn't lived a full life; he never had a stable job, so much so that at one point he was hired as a caregiver by his elderly mother. When his mother, unfortunately, passed away, Luciano found himself disoriented, unemployed, facing great difficulties in finding a job, and without a social network. He thus entered a situation of poverty and loneliness that is barely visible from the outside. Without support, Luciano's situation would become increasingly severe over time."

In 2025, the Diocesan Caritas of Trieste also accompanied 65 people in alternative measures to detention, integrating them as volunteers in the activities of the Refectory, Dormitory, Logistics, and Spazio 11: opportunities for service, relationships, and giving back to the community for individuals who, through the prison experience, had lost their social networks and, even more, the chance to feel useful to others.

Finally, alarm is growing for university students: as many as 34 students (with an average age of 25, often foreigners and without support) turned to the Center due to severe difficulties in affording rent, utilities, and university fees. Often, coming from distant countries in conflict situations, lacking family support, facing language barriers, and struggling to meet the strict limits imposed to maintain their scholarships puts them in a condition of extreme vulnerability.

Before the final debate, which proved very lively and well-attended, Father Giovanni La Manna offered some precise points: "The title of this meeting gives us three words: data, faces, perspectives. They are a journey of responsibility. Data prevent us from minimizing. Faces prevent us from dehumanizing. Perspectives prevent us from resigning ourselves. Caritas data do not measure all the poverty in Trieste, but they tell the story of the part of the city we have managed to meet. Behind every number is a person who knocked on a door, sat in front of us, and entrusted someone with a question, a struggle, sometimes even a silence." And to material poverty, with its thousands of variations, he added human and cultural poverty "which can strike an entire community. It happens when we no longer recognize the other as a person. A society can be economically prosperous and, at the same time, humanly impoverished. It becomes so when it gets used to suffering, divides the poor into deserving and undesirable, or pits the hardship of an elderly Triestine against that of a migrant family. Pain does not become less real because the person experiencing it was born elsewhere." Finally, an appeal to public decision-makers: "We do not ask politics merely to be moved by poverty, but to choose. Solidarity cannot replace rights, and volunteering cannot compensate indefinitely for structural inadequacies."