Not a quarry (any more)
Every distance at La Corsa della Bora finishes at PortoPiccolo. Before it gets there the course drops down to the sea, picks up a stretch of the CAI 023 — the Sentiero Tiziana Weiss — and threads through link paths with no number of their own. It’s the last kilometre, the one where your legs have nothing left and you keep going because you can see the sea.
That sea now sits inside a village. Until the 1970s there was a working stone quarry here; then it stood idle for almost forty years. The square, the marina, the houses you see as you cross the finish line weren’t there: there was a rock face dropping sheer into the sea, and nothing else. The geography explains itself — the recent history even more so.
How the stone was quarried
Aurisina limestone is grey, sometimes with hazel-brown veining, and almost pure: up to 99.2% calcium carbonate. It has been cut from these cliffs since at least the 1st century BC — the date research gives for the start of quarrying on the Trieste Karst. The blocks went down to the sea on wooden slides kept constantly wet, the lizze: as far as anyone knows, the Romans were the first to build chutes this size down to the sea. From there the stone went out by ship.
Two thousand years of stone: from Aquileia to Ravenna
Aquileia used it on a huge scale for five centuries, from the 1st century BC to the 5th AD: architectural elements, statues, funerary urns, inscriptions. Tergeste, Roman Trieste, is full of it too — public buildings, sculptures. Traces have turned up as far away as Pavia, probably carried there by river. In the 6th century, under the Ostrogoths, Aurisina stone went into the Mausoleum of Theodoric in Ravenna, built around 520: this summer an exhibition at Palazzo Rasponi in Ravenna retraced exactly that route, from Aquileia down to Ravenna itself.
The quarries never stopped altogether. A few hundred metres from where PortoPiccolo stands, the Cava Romana is still working: a chasm 110 metres deep, one of the largest open-cast quarries in Europe, limestone 99.8% pure. The PortoPiccolo quarry stopped in the Seventies; the one next door did not.
From quarry to village: twenty years of building work
Once the quarry closed, the site was left an industrial void overlooking the sea for decades. A first redevelopment scheme fell through in 1992. In 1994 the land passed to Carlo Dodi, a businessman from Mantua, and for years one plan followed another — Rob Krier and Renzo Piano were working on one of the versions too — without work on site ever really starting. The project book below, found in the archives, dates from that phase: ink and watercolour drawings for a terraced waterfront that was never built.
The scheme that finally got built was a different one: a masterplan by the architect Francesco Luparelli, landscape by Andreas Kipar, officially presented on 29 July 2010. Work began at the turn of 2010–2011, over an area of 353,000 square metres, with an investment estimated at the time at 245 million euros — rising, according to the most recent sources, to around 400 million by the time it was finished. The village opened in the spring of 2014; the first five-star hotel in the area followed a year later, in July 2015.
Photo: Edilizia Trieste (Facebook)
What stays with you, running
There is no monument to look at on the last kilometre. There is a square, a marina, the sea — and the fact that twenty years ago, on that very spot, there was nothing but an abandoned quarry face. Anyone reaching PortoPiccolo on 9 or 10 January 2027 finishes their race in a place that was dug out, then left behind, then rebuilt from scratch: industry first, then emptiness, then landscape again.
It won’t change your pace and it won’t win you a minute. But knowing where you’re heading — and where that place came from — is part of why you run here and not somewhere else.
Corsa della Bora — 9–10 January 2027, Trieste.
Fonti: Il Piccolo, 30/07/2010 — Il Sole 24 Ore — Marmo di Aurisina, Wikipedia — Archeocarta FVG, la Cava Romana.