Pula
"The arena is two thousand years old and still hosts concerts. Pula doesn't treat its history like a museum."
What gets you about Pula isn’t the first sight of the amphitheater — it’s the second. The first time you see it you stop, of course, because it’s enormous and Roman and suddenly there in front of you when you were walking along thinking about where to eat. But the second time is when it’s just behind you while you’re buying something at a shop, or visible at the end of an unremarkable street, or lit up through a restaurant window while you’re eating seafood. That’s when you understand that Pula lives alongside this thing in a completely unsentimental way, and that the unsentimental relationship is what makes it interesting.
Pula is at the southern tip of Istria and it’s a real city — naval port, industrial harbour, university town, places where people work night shifts and buy groceries on Tuesdays. The amphitheater, the Arch of the Sergii, the Temple of Augustus on the Forum — these sit inside the actual urban fabric, not in a fenced-off zone. I walked through the Forum on a Thursday afternoon and there were students eating sandwiches in front of a temple that was standing when Christ was alive. Nobody seemed to find this remarkable. That normalcy is Pula’s particular gift.
The amphitheater seats 23,000 people and is the sixth-largest Roman arena in the world. In summer it hosts concerts — opera, rock, whatever gets sold — and the logistics of watching a performance inside two-thousand-year-old walls while a Mediterranean evening cools around you is an experience that resists comparison with anything. I was there in September for an opera, arrived early to walk the perimeter before it started, ran my hand along the blocks of local stone that the Romans quarried from the very cape the city sits on, felt the warmth the stone had been holding all day.
The Croatian-Italian identity of Istria shows more visibly in Pula than anywhere else on the peninsula. Street signs appear in both languages. The restaurants carry menus where the names of fish seem to oscillate between Croatian and Italian depending on which side of the table you’re sitting on. Brodetto — the fish stew — appears here as a direct cousin of the brodet you find up the coast and the Italian brodetto further west, each local cook maintaining that theirs is the original. I ate three different versions over two days and declined to adjudicate.
The small beach at Verudela and the coves around the Premantura peninsula to the south offer the Adriatic without the summer circus of the bigger Istrian resorts. The drive to Cape Kamenjak at the very tip of Istria takes you through karst scrubland smelling of rosemary and sage to cliffs where the sea is a colour you want to argue about naming. I swam there in October, alone, in water so clear I could see my feet on the white rock bottom four metres down.
When to go: May through June and September through October are the sweet spots — warm enough for swimming, thin enough in crowds that the city feels like itself. July and August fill the campgrounds and the arena schedule fills with events if that’s your reason for coming. Winter is quiet and cold but the Forum is something else again at Christmas, and the Istrians seem genuinely pleased to see visitors who aren’t there for the beaches.