Some numbers belong to no one in particular. Others carry a whole life inside them. For Nico de Corato, eighty carried two meanings at once: the age his mother would have reached this year, and the distance he decided to run through the city where she was born. The number was hers before it was his.
On Friday 24 July, at eight in the morning, the Naples-born entrepreneur and ultramarathoner set off alone from Parco Carelli, in Posillipo, the neighbourhood where his mother grew up. Ahead of him lay eighty kilometres through Naples, along what the organisers described as a spine of memory: a route built not around performance but around places, most of it unfolding along the city’s seafront, with detours through the streets that shaped his family’s story. The date was not chosen for the calendar’s convenience. It marked the fourth anniversary of his mother’s death, after years of living with Alzheimer’s disease.
The initiative is called 80 voglia di correre (per mamma) — a play on words that reads, roughly, as a great desire to run, for mum. The name says almost everything: this was a son’s tribute before it was anything else. It was presented at a press conference in the council chamber of Palazzo San Giacomo and carries the patronage of the City of Naples. At its centre is a fundraising campaign for AIMA, the Italian Alzheimer’s Disease Association, which supported de Corato’s mother and his family through the years of her illness. A stand was set up at the finish line on the Lungomare for anyone who wanted to contribute or simply understand the work the association does.
The spirit of the day was set from the very first kilometre. There were no registrations, no timing chips, no rankings and no finishing classification. Anyone who wanted to join could do so, for a single kilometre or for twenty, at whatever pace they were able to hold. The route was deliberately designed to remain accessible, so that friends, runners, families and passers-by could step in and out of it during the day. The final kilometre he ran alongside his daughter, one generation running beside the memory of another. The arrival on the seafront, expected between five and seven in the evening, was itself a chosen place: it is where he and his mother had lunch together for the last time.
A Naples–Dubai story
For readers who follow the Italy–Gulf corridor, de Corato is a familiar figure. An engineer by training, he has been based in the Emirates since 2004, where he works as an entrepreneur, investor and content creator. His endurance record is built almost entirely on solo undertakings rather than official competitions, the best known of them a run of close to two hundred kilometres ending at the Burj Al Arab.
What made 24 July different is that the destination was not a landmark. It was a memory, and a city that holds it.
Alzheimer’s erodes recognition long before it takes a life, and it is often the family that carries the daily weight of it. Associations such as AIMA exist precisely in that gap, supporting caregivers who rarely appear in any narrative about the illness. By running eighty kilometres through Naples on the anniversary of his mother’s death, de Corato gave that invisible work a route, a finish line and a day of public attention.
Eighty years. Eighty kilometres. One city, remembered on foot — and a mother who was there for every one of them.
