Buzet

The smell hits you before you see the market. It’s the truffle smell — that particular combination of damp earth, mushroom, and something gamier and more animal underneath — and it drifts through the streets of Buzet’s old town on Saturday mornings in October with the insistence of something that knows exactly what it’s doing. I followed it through the stone gate and down a lane and found a small market: three vendors, a dozen varieties of truffle products, a queue of local people who clearly had a specific vendor in mind and weren’t experimenting.

Buzet is Istria’s truffle capital in title as well as fact. The hilltop old town looks north over the Mirna River valley and the forests that climb toward the Čičarija mountains, where the Tuber magnatum grows in autumn concentration. The lower town below the hill is modern, functional, the place where the pharmacy and the supermarket and the fuel station are — but you walk up to the old town for the thing Buzet does best, which is making the truffle experience feel lived-in rather than packaged.

In late September, Buzet hosts Subotina — the truffle festival — a two-day event culminating in the preparation of a fuži pasta and truffle scrambled egg so large it requires a pan wider than a dining table and a crowd gathered around it. The record egg used about ten kilograms of truffles. I watched the preparation the one year I was there for it, standing in a crowd that included elderly residents in good coats who had been watching this happen for decades, teenagers filming it for reasons that seemed only partly ironic, and a number of Italian day-trippers who had driven over the border specifically for this. The moment the first ladle of egg hit the pan and the truffle smell expanded outward in a warm cloud, the crowd made a collective sound that I can only describe as grateful.

The restaurants in the old town are serious about what they do. I ate twice at a place on the main square that made fuži — the local hand-rolled pasta, short and twisted — with a shaved white truffle and brown butter that arrived in a clay pot, still bubbling from the oven. The pasta was slightly firm, the butter was nutty, the truffle was the kind of quantity that made me aware I was in the place that actually produces this ingredient rather than shipping it somewhere else for consumption. I drank Teran, the local red, which is rough-edged and tannic and was the right wine for the weight of the dish.

The wine cellars around Buzet are worth visiting independently of any festival. The Mirna valley white wines — Malvazija in particular — and the Teran reds are still made in quantities small enough that most producers will sit with you and talk about what they’re doing if you arrive at a reasonable hour and express genuine interest. The olive oil from the same territory is equally serious, and the frantoia — the press — above the valley near the village of Roč runs during November harvest and is open to visitors.

When to go: Late September through early November is truffle season and the most rewarding time — Subotina in late September if you want the festival, or any October weekend if you want the market and the forest smell without the crowds. Spring is lovely here: the valley below turns green rapidly and the old town is quiet enough to hear your own footsteps on the cobblestones.