Istria: Our Last Stop in Croatia

Just a short one on our last days in Croatia as I’ve gotten a bit backed up by spending all my time eating gelato.

Our last stops in Croatia were in the Istrian Peninsula which is in the north-west part of Croatia right near Italy. It has a very Italian feel to it, with Italian commonly spoken in the streets. It’s famous for old Venetian towns and ancient Roman buildings, and TRUFFLES! Lots and lots of delicious truffles. They even sell whole truffles in the supermarket. This is the place where we really went to town on the truffles. I think almost every meal we had here had truffles in them. And they were good. Fish or steak with truffles is a big thing here, pretty much every restaurant has it in the menu. As well as pasta options with truffles. And they’re very generous with the truffles too, you’ll get big pieces of them in your food, and the best bit is that the prices are very reasonable. Only AU$40 for an excellent steak with a huge pile of truffles in a top quality restaurant. That’s probably enough on truffles now.

Zadar is an old Roman colony where they only discovered the ancient forum in the 1930s. Turns out the early Christians nicked all the columns and other stone blocks from pagan temples to build their churches, then they buried what was left of the forum.

World War II was ‘helpful’ for the restoration of the forum as all the bombs dropped helped to ‘excavate’ the ruins.

Rovinj is an old and pretty Venetian town with a big cathedral and belltower on top of the town. The belltower is actually a copy of the one in Venice. But the one in Venice fell down about 100 years ago and they didn’t have any plans or drawings to rebuild it, so the engineers went to Rovinj to study that belltower so they could make a copy of it back in Venice.

Pula has a very well preserved Roman amphitheatre, all of the outside wall has been preserved, and some of the internal structures as well. The local people were very protective of it through their history and even fought their Venetian overlords when they wanted to take it stone by stone and rebuild the whole thing in Venice to show off how mighty they were. Pula also has a cool aquarium built inside an fortress. Because that’s just what you do in old cities.

Our last stop was Porec which is famous for having one of the oldest churches in the world which still has its original structures. The oldest parts of the church are 1500 years old.

They also have some great mosaics in the ceiling which are a nice taster if you’re going to see St Mark’s in Venice later.

One last thing on Croatia, we never figured it out during our time there, but pirate-themed candy shops are everywhere. We don’t know why, but every few hundred metres you’ll come across a shop with barrels of lollies, and pictures of pirates, skulls and treasure chests decorating the whole thing. For some reason lollies aren’t worth buying unless you’re buying them from Captain Jack Sparrow.