Piran is a must-see Slovenian seaside town

2024-08-14 07:45:33

When I returned to my car at the Fornače parking lot after the first exploration of Piran, there was a parking ticket in the window: it was 80 euros, said the city administration, because I drove illegally to via XX ulica at 10:37. How did they do that I wondered as I approached the ticket booth to pay the parking fees. Are they following me or is there a camera? “You have to clarify this with the authority of the city police, the address is on the Internet,” said a fat man and stuck his head out to get a parking ticket. Then you want 35 euros. “It’s here,” he said, pointing to a blue board in front of the exit barrier. 35 euros for three hours off!

The racetrack is planted with pine trees

I immediately fell in love with Piran. After parking the car, I walked along the pine-lined road to Portorož. Retirees doze on their beach towels under the trees. Further, where Croatia started after the next sea, a group on the boat was making a lot of noise. The street parallel to the promenade is called Fornac’e, a loan word from Italian that means kiln, brick works. In fact, a large brick chimney rises on a side street. The buildings around it are partly dilapidated. The application has been closed for a long time. Under the canopy of a nearby building used by the city’s cleaning services, five or six men in protective clothing sat smoking on bar stools. “There are brick works and a soap factory here. Films were shot in the rooms of abandoned factories in the 1960s and 70s,” explains the elder. You can remember the movies and the hustle and bustle well. “They drive there, actors and actresses – they stay in expensive hotels in Portorož,” said the club’s spokesman, referring to Fornac’e Street. Yugoslavian and international films were shot in Piran, such as “The Girl from the Salt Flats” with Marcello Mastroianni. His father, I learned from the city cleaning staff, earned a good salary as an extra. “You can use it to buy a new engine for your boat.”

Days by sea: PiranImage Alliance

Few people know about Piran’s past as “Hollywood on Adriatic”. On the other hand, everyone here is proud of the most famous son, Giuseppe Tartini. The Tartini Festival has been held every summer in the small Adriatic town since 2002. Hotels and restaurants bear its name, and it bows like a bronze figure in Piazza Tartini. The composer, music composer and violinist, born on April 8, 1692, grew up in rich circumstances – his father was the manager of the salt mines, and Piran owed his fortune to the salt fields. Giuseppe Tartini was immortalized by the “Tartini tones” he discovered – different tones created by combining two individual tones with different frequencies.

“If there was no salt here, Giuseppe Tartini would not have been born in Piran,” said Dragan Klarica. The director of the Tartini Festival suggests a walking tour. As we cross Tartiniplatz, surrounded by towers with cafes and shops, it looks like a big stage. Two steps away, with a marble fountain in front of the entrance, is Tartini’s birthplace, now a museum. One of Tartini’s violins hangs in a display case. During the repair work, the equipment, which was thought to be lost, was discovered in a hole in a wall in the town hall, said my colleague. During the Second World War, the then governor brought the violin to safety. “With the chaos after the end of the war, we forgot about it.” Piazza Tartini spreads out below us, its cobblestones made of Istrian marble reflecting the sunlight. The place was a boat landing stage, “we still use the Italian word “Mandracchio” for it today,” said Klarica.

Venetian beauty

Then I walked past the municipal high school, a palace from the beginning of the last century, along the cobbled streets to the top where the old town buildings are gathered like the steps of an amphitheater. Looking through doors covered with nylon ropes falls into black holes. Flower pots are lined up on several floors in front of the windows on the higher floors. The streets are slightly curved so that the rainwater can flow to the side. Those who have slabs in the middle between paving stones have ways that are connected to others; themselves in the maze of the old city. Citizens parked their cars on the hill, where parts of the city walls still remain. The fact that the rough terrain is a challenge even for experienced hikers is illustrated by the example of a young woman who opens the trunk of her small car and is exchanging her high heels for white sneakers.

The Cathedral of St. George, modeled on St. Mark’s Tower in Venice with a separate bell tower, stands on a cliff directly above the Adriatic Sea. Swifts perform acrobatic flight maneuvers. A level road leads to Fiesa. He passed under the rocks where capers grew in the cracks, and the gorse flowers glowed yellow. A short distance from the beach, a man in a red suit leans on the engine of his boat. Fiesa, with its rocky beach, a few hotels and apartments, looks sunny, not compared to the crowded old city center. In the evening, groups of young people are laughing and running after a ball in a park.

Old town with beach: Piran is too beautiful to just stay for a whileImage Alliance

The next morning, I met Manuela Rojec, president of the Italian cultural association Giuseppe Tartini Pirano, at a small port in front of the old town. While Rojec was talking about his side projects – it was about the Italian heritage of Piran – I watched a delivery man using a hand truck to push goods in cardboard boxes up a hill. Wrought iron lamps and air conditioning units stand on the facades, weathered white boxes. He has been the president of the culture party for fifteen years, and there is no politician from Italy in Piran at this time, Rojec said, and he always uses the Italian name Pirano. “We, the small members of Italy, are not important in terms of numbers, we are easily forgotten.” Therefore: “Esodo”, the trauma of the exodus of 300,000 Italians from Istria after the Second World War, was a wound. Rojec said. The Venetian heritage in Piran is unmistakable – St Mark’s Lion, the heraldic animal of Venice, stands guard at every second corner.

If you drive north from Fiesa, you can reach Strunjan in five minutes by car. The Tartini family, as shown in the fresco in the house where he was born, has a large country house in Strunjan with olive groves, salt mines and a fish farm. The sun is burning. Bathers lounge on plastic loungers in the partial shade between pine trees. A family of four children, all in their uniforms, are scrambling on the floor eating pizza from a takeout box. Further forward, where there are showers, three or four boys line up on the concrete sea wall and in unison jump forward with a further round into the Adriatic. If you pass under the Hotel Villa Tartini, you take a trail to a rock formation. A stone the size of his head littered the beach. I use my towel to build a garden on the branches. I nodded off with the smell of overgrowing greenery and salt in my nose, which covers the round bank of stones with a transparent crust. I dreamed of all the long wigs, party bows and gauntlets tossed by the wind – Tartini was said to be a jovial fellow with a penchant for dueling. When I opened my eyes, a naked, tanned person passed in front of me. Would Giuseppe Tartini have turned his head in shame at this true fact? Maybe not, he is not shy. Now, I saw him jumping up and holding his sword. The man in the hollow hastened his pace, Tartini running after him and raising his sword: it is about paragraph 183, about the misrepresentation, and the poet cannot be funny about it. Am I wrong, or was the naked man the dirty guy from the parking lot the day I arrived? Yes, he is: Hurry up, Tartini, that ass, draw him with your sword!