The Duino Karst

The Timavo river originates in Croatia, sinks into the Škocjan Caves in Slovenia, and travels nearly forty kilometres underground before re-emerging in San Giovanni di Duino. From there, it's just two kilometres to the sea: it's the river with the shortest estuary in Italy. Virgil mentioned it three times, and in the Aeneid, he describes it as it erupts “through nine mouths with a loud roar”.

A short distance from the springs opens the Cave of the god Mithras, the only known underground Mithraic temple in Italy: discovered in 1965, it housed altars, stelae, and over four hundred coins from a cult that remained active from the 1st to the 5th century AD. The Sardon races run alongside the river mouths for the first few kilometres, when the group is still compact and fast.

Between October 1911 and April 1912, the Prague poet Rainer Maria Rilke stayed at the castle of Duino-Devin, guest of the princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis. Walking along these cliffs, he heard in the wind the words that would give rise to the Duino Elegies, one of the pinnacles of 20th-century European poetry.

The path that bears his name today runs for more than two kilometres overlooking the Adriatic, within the Duino Cliffs Nature Reserve: the white limestone plunges sixty metres into the blue. Classified by the CAI as suitable for everyone – and for runners, the Sardon is the grand finale, with the late August afternoon light on the sea.

Everything begins and ends at the Villaggio del Pescatore Island: start from the sea, finish on the beach. Behind, the Cernizza woods – where in 1994 Antonio was discovered, a Tethyshadros insularis lived seventy million years ago, the most complete medium-large dinosaur discovered in Europe since 1878, today at the Civic Museum of Natural History of Trieste.

Above the bay, the trenches of Punta Bratina, an identifying passage for every Sardon race: from up there the view encompasses the Staranzano lagoon, the Village and the profile of the castle of Duino-Devin.