Motovun

The fog was sitting in the Mirna valley like something that had decided not to leave. It was seven in the morning, October, and from the parking lot at the base of the hill the town above was only a suggestion — stone walls and a church tower floating above the white. I walked up through the fog and arrived somewhere that smelled of damp oak leaf and earth, and before I found a café a man was already coming down the hill with a dog and a canvas bag and that particular expression of someone who knows where he’s been and isn’t saying.

Motovun sits on a ridge above the Mirna valley, surrounded by the oak and hornbeam forest where Tuber magnatum — the white truffle — grows in autumn from roughly late September through November. The town has been here since Illyrian times, became Venetian, became part of a dozen political configurations, and ended up in Croatia having accumulated walls and towers and a main square as handsome as anything you’ll find in the region. But in October the town exists primarily as an anteroom to the forest, and everyone knows it.

I had breakfast at a restaurant that was already doing serious work at nine in the morning — a small place on the main square where a woman in an apron brought me scrambled eggs shaved with white truffle and a glass of Malvazija. The truffle smell, when the plate arrived, was overwhelming in the best way: mushroom and garlic and something animal, something that smells like the forest floor when you push your hand into the leaves. The eggs were barely cooked, still creamy, folded around the shavings rather than scrambled into them. I ate slowly and ordered another coffee and felt unreasonably content about being alive.

The walk along the medieval walls rewards the legs after breakfast. The outer wall circuit takes twenty minutes at pace, though most people slow considerably once they see the valley. The Mirna winds below through fields and orchards, the fog breaking where the sun finds it, the oak forest extending north toward Slovenia in a darkness that looks impenetrable and is, apparently, extremely specific about where its fungi will grow. In summer the same walk is done in Motovun Film Festival t-shirts, the annual event turning this hillside into an outdoor cinema for five days that the locals seem amused and slightly overwhelmed by in equal measure.

Hum, the world’s smallest town, is twenty kilometres east and deserves its own afternoon; Oprtalj is another hilltop village slightly further and completely different in character. But Motovun anchors the inland Istrian experience in a way those places don’t. It is the one where the convergence of landscape, food, and medieval architecture happens so cleanly that arriving here in the right season feels less like tourism and more like arriving at the exact right moment for something that was already occurring without you.

When to go: Late September through November for truffle season — the experience then is unlike any other time. Late April through May is the second-best window, with wildflowers on the valley floor and the restaurants reopening with visible relief. Avoid August unless you enjoy the annual film festival, which brings crowds to this otherwise quiet place and transforms the main square into something quite different.