We are wrapping up our very short visit to Istria today as once again the calender is getting away from us. We visited two cities today, one really caught our fancy and the other missed catching our fancy but was interesting .
Rovinj is advertised as the most picturesque town in Istria, and the advertisements were correct. When we first arrived and parked François we were overlooking a working harbor with the fishing fleet just coming into port to off load their catch into trucks. The process was interesting and we enjoyed watching the crews working to pack the fish into ice and load them on the trucks. Also, occasionally a local would walk up to one of the fishermen and buy a couple of fish or a kilo of sardines literally off the boat.
From the commercial docks we could see the old town, but it was not the picturesque views Ton remembered from her research. As we got closer to the old town it was interesting to see the construction where some of the houses actually acted as a kind of sea wall for the town.
The town clearly had character. We were climbing up to the church that sits at the top of the hill that the old town is built on, when we both noticed how worn the paving stones were in the narrow alleys. A lot of people had walked these streets over the centuries.
It was a good climb to the top where the church dominated the town. The church itself was not overly impressive, but we did like the image at the top of the tower of a sailor steering a ship. This is clearly a town dedicated to the sea and the old town was until the late 1700’s an island. In the 1700’s they filled the small canal that separated it from the mainland.
On the descent from the church Ton was telling me that what we had seen did not quite match the pictures she had seen when researching Rovinj. Just then we emerged onto a square on the other side of town where a beautiful waterfront and leisure harbor opened up in front of us. Ton laughed and said these are the pictures I remember, and then went off to take her own.
Rovinj is a beautiful and picturesque place. We debated having lunch here but decided to instead head on to Pula as the day was getting away from us.
Pula is an old city and was the center of the Roman government for this area. It contains a few very well preserved Roman buildings and we were looking forward to seeing them. What we didn’t expect was that Pula was a big bustling industrial port. We had really enjoyed the small scale of the towns in Istria so suddenly finding ourselves in a busy city was a little bit of a shock.
After a little adventure getting lost, for once I will concede that Gretas directions were correct, I just didn’t follow them. We headed over to the Roman amphitheater following Googles walking direction. Google told us it was about 1km mostly flat. Ton and I laughed about that the whole way as we were either going up or down pretty sizable hills and we debated where the person who characterized the walk as flat had grown up.
Google then lead us to a dead end and we had to improvise our way to the amphitheater which involved climbing some pretty good hills and stairs. We finally got near the amphitheater but found a fairly modern fort in our way and decided to give up as it was closed for repairs. From the fort we could see the Roman Colosseum in the distance, checking with Google it told us it was a little over a kilometer away. For some reason we both thought it was closed for maintenance so we decided to pass on the walk.
We walked down to the old town and found the last Roman ruin which was a Forum. After a few photos we both realized we were hungry and decided to call it a day.
Pula is the kind of town that we usually enjoy. It is a little rough around the edges, but has a lot of interesting sites. But today we did not connect with it. I think we had adjusted to the smaller towns we had been in and the size put us off a bit. Also, we were a bit hungry having skipped lunch. I think if we had more time we might return because it turns out we were both wrong and the Colosseum is not closed for maintenance and would probably be very interesting to tour.