A trail named after a god
After Duino the Corsa della Bora course takes the CAI 001a. On the maps it is called the Mitreo trail, and five of the seven races run along it: the S1 Family Hike & Trail, the S1 Half, the Borderless, the TransKarst and the Bora Ultra. The Borin stays below, and the Trieste Ultra has already finished at PortoPiccolo.
The name is not decoration. A short distance away, in a narrow doline on the slopes of Monte Ermada, level with San Giovanni di Duino and close to the springs of the Timavo, there is a cave that two thousand years ago was a temple.
What was inside
The cave was reopened in 1963 by cavers from the Società Alpina delle Giulie. It was filled with stones up to the roof: under two metres of debris came Roman material — an incomplete inscribed pillar, fragments of reliefs, pottery, many oil lamps, roof tiles and 98 coins, a good number of them now illegible. And a squared block of stone about half a metre on each side, in all likelihood the sacrificial altar.
Two limestone reliefs show a young man sacrificing a bull to the Sun god: it is the fixed scene of the cult of Mithras, the tauroctony. The finds went to the museum in Aquileia.
Why it matters
Dozens of mithraea are known across the empire, but they were almost always built rooms: cellars, underground spaces, artificial basements imitating a cave. The one at Duino is the only one in Europe made in a natural cavity. Not a stage set of a cave: a cave.
The cult came from the east and was initiatory: you entered by degrees, you ate together in the dark, there were no temples on the square. On the eastern border of the empire, a few steps from the springs of the Timavo, it was the religion of the men on garrison duty.
Running over the top of it
You do not see it during the race: the cave lies in a doline off the course, closed, and can only be visited on guided tours. Of the Mitreo, as you run, what remains is the name on the trail sign — and the fact that two thousand years ago someone climbed up here in the dark for the same reasons we do: because what counts happens outside the city.