The wall above Barcola
In the small hours the S1 Trieste Ultra and the S1 Bora Ultra drop down to the sea at Barcola, run past the Topolini and then turn uphill. From there to the plateau is under two kilometres on the map, with more than two hundred metres of climbing: the CAI 009 goes up towards Contovello, and higher up it shares its line with the fishermen’s path, Ribiška pot.
It is one of the climbs you remember from the race. It is worth knowing who used to climb it before us, and what they carried on their heads.
The fish went up on foot
The hardest part of the job fell to the women. The men went out to sea, and came in at Cedas, below Contovello. The women came down in the morning, sometimes thirty of them at once, bought the fish on the shore and carried it up: baskets on their heads, up the stone steps between the terraces, and went on to sell it in Trieste, on the plateau and across the border.
This was not an exception, and not an occasional errand: it was the job, every day, with the load balanced and both hands free. Anyone climbing up there today with poles and a couple of gels in their pocket is doing the easy version of that climb.
Where to see it for yourself
The story of Slovene fishing along this coast — dugout boats, nets, photographs of the women with their baskets — is told at the Museo della Pesca del Litorale Triestino, the fishing museum of the Trieste coast, in Santa Croce, above the stretch the race runs. It is a few hundred metres from the route and open all year.
Contovello
There is no settled answer on where the name of the village comes from: opinion is divided between a Romance root and a Slavic one. What you can see is not in doubt: houses pinned to the escarpment, terraced vineyards, the gulf in front and the plateau behind. From up there at night, in the race, you see the lights of Trieste on one side and the darkness of the Karst on the other.
A note on the name
Today the name “Sentiero dei Pescatori”, or Ribiška pot, denotes one specific route: the path that drops from Aurisina to the small harbour and beach at Canovella degli Zoppoli. That is how the official publication of the Miramare Biosphere Reserve (Riserva della Biosfera di Miramare) describes it, distinguishing it from the Sentiero Natura, CAI no. 9 (CAI: Club Alpino Italiano, the Italian Alpine Club) – the old paved way running down from the pond of Contovello towards Grignano. Two different names for two different paths: there is no argument about that.
But today’s name does not tell us who walked these paths in the past. The Regional Decentralisation Authority of Trieste (Ente di Decentramento Regionale), describing the Cedas–Contovello–Miramare route, calls the descent from Strada Berda – that same CAI no. 9 – a “fishermen’s path (Sentiero Natura – CAI no. 9)”: an old track used by the people of the Karst, chiefly during the tuna-fishing season, when lookouts stationed above would signal the shoals. The cultural heritage catalogue of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, writing of Contovello and the coast below, speaks of “numerous so-called fishermen’s paths” linking the village to the shore amid dry-stone walls and terraces. The Società Alpina delle Giulie (the Trieste section of the Italian Alpine Club), describing the descent from Contovello towards Barcola, mentions “a recently rediscovered fishermen’s route” down to the small harbour at Cedas, the landing place of Contovello’s fishermen, a memory kept alive by the Museum of Fishing of the Trieste Coast (Museo della pesca del Litorale triestino).
In short: Ribiška pot, as a proper name, is the Aurisina–Canovella path; the Sentiero Natura is CAI no. 9 at Contovello. But the fishermen’s paths, historically, were a network of routes rather than a single path – and the stairways that drop from Contovello to the sea were part of it. It is those stairways that this article is about.