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Achingly white limestone cliffs rise sharply from a cobalt blue sea. A lone sailing boat leaves a soft wake in the water, and the silence that fills the air is barely interrupted by leaves gently murmuring in the breeze.
I am walking along the Sentiero Rilke, a slender path that meanders along the cliff edge between the boat-studded marina of Sistiana and the tiny village of Duino, near Trieste.
Stretched between sea and sky, and backed up against a thick pine tree wood, it inspired the Prague-born poet Rainer Maria Rilke—who spent several months in Duino from 1911 to 1912 as a guest of the local lords, the Princes Thurn und Taxis—to write his Duino Elegies, which is why the path is named after him.
Story has it that Rilke was walking down the path one stormy winter morning, as the waves of the Adriatic roared and crashed against the cliffs, when he heard a voice. He turned around but could see no one. Those mysterious words floating in the air became the beginning of the first of his Elegies: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders? And what if one of them would suddenly take me to his heart: I would fade away in his stronger presence. Because beauty is nothing else but the beginning of terror.”
In a dazzling summer morning, the views along the path spark anything except terror. Awe, maybe, and yearning, wonder, peacefulness and, for me, many memories, because I went to boarding school in Duino, and the Rilke path was at the same time refuge and escape.
But even stripping it of the rosy-tinted halo of my teenage years, it is a place of rugged beauty. The Adriatic Sea gently laps the mellow bay of Sistiana before the path veers inland into a greenery of pine trees, broken up by the brilliant red of berries and flowers. Then a bend and, sheer below it, the water fills my eyes again, the crest of crystal wavelets sparkling like polished diamonds in the dancing sun.
It ends—too soon—in the powerful ochre walls and crenellated towers of the Castello di Duino, perched high above a jagged white rock that legend wants to be the wife of a cruel castle lord, pushed down the cliff by her husband and magically turned into stone before she could drown.
The Rilke path starts opposite the offices of AIAT (the local tourist board) in Sistiana and ends on the outskirts of Duino. For further information call the tourist board on +39 0432 734100.