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World video travel guide
Rainer Maria Rilke\'s walks around Duino
In the first years of the twentieth century Trieste was a culturally very lively and avantgarde town, also compared to the rest of Italy. Many personalities of the European culture sojourned here, like Strindberg, Freud, and Ibsen. The castle of Duino in particular, property of the Counts of Thurn and Taxis, almost became a small court that received poets and musicians. Among these, a famous name, which Duino still remembers with a famous path, is Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the greatest German-speaking poets of the Modern Age and one of the greatest lyric interpreters of modern spirituality. Rilke, an unhappy and tortured poet, a homeless traveller, lived at Duino between 1911 and 1912; here he found a provisional shelter for his stray life. The walks between the rocks and the sea in the surroundings of the castle inspired him to the famous lines of the Duino Elegies that are his most famous work, because they form the peak of inspiration and of poetic expression. Today, the Rilke path is a fascinating route of about two kilometres, plunged in the nature on the edge of the coast high over the sea that joins Duino and Sistiana through the typical rocks and the pinewood.
The new castle of Duino is a building of very old origin, with a powerful tower and fifteenth-century walls. During the First World War it was bombed by Italian cannons, but today, after a careful restoration, is still inhabited by the descendants of the family Thurn and Taxis. Apart from the new castle, after a creek, you can see the picturesque remains of the old castle, the first home of the lords of Duino. Close to its ruins, a rock in human-like form remembers the legend of the white lady, the unhappy wife of a cruel lord of the castle who flung her into the sea, but she was transformed into a rock.
