AA Day 33

Today’s route on the Alpe-Adria took a long loop inland, so we followed the Cammino trail instead. 

We said goodbye to our B&B hosts, and set off from Duino.  The route initially followed the Rilke path; Christine had studied this German poet at university, but didn’t know anything about his time in Italy.  The routes finally diverged, with the Alpe-Adria heading inland, and our path following the main road along the coast.  There was a nice, wide pavement to walk on, and we missed the turn off up the hill, luckily only by about 100m.  We crossed the busy road, and worked our way up the hillside.  This took us about 50m up the hill and then levelled out.  There were numerous caves in this area.  Some had been excavated to provide gun emplacements in both world wars.  We followed this path, working through some fairly rough areas, with great views of the coast, and also some really good bits of path.  We followed another narrow diagonal path up the hillside to the next “level”, leading to another easy path.  After a while the Alpe-Adria path joined up with our route.  A sign informed us that we had passed through a Hungarian WWI training area, with dugouts, trenches, firing areas, etc.  We walked into Prosecco, surprised that there seemed to be no vineyards or wineries.  There is no accommodation in Prosecco and we had booked a hotel back down on the coast.  The route down turned out to be a staircase, which then led us through the International Centre for Theoretical Physics.  We reached the coast, and had a short walk to our hotel.  The hotel promised superb sunsets over the Adriatic, but tonight’s wasn’t nearly as good as last night’s, as seen from the pizzeria next to the main road.  There’s a super-yacht (called A) anchored in the bay.  It belongs(ed) to a Russian billionaire and was seized by the Italian police last year.  The final countdown has now started; we’ve got all our accommodation booked to Muggia, and our flight home.