Art & Culture

Like its sister in Zagreb, the Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka is one of the city's most staggering architectural landmarks, a glorious, 130-year-old remnant of former Austro-Hungarian rule that offers international renowned ballet, opera, music performance and drama to residents and visitors in the Kvarner region. With its season now closed for the summer, there's still opportunity to catch some spectacular opera and classical music presented the theatre as they have decamped to Pula's wonderfully well preserved Roman amphitheatre where they will perform three unforgettable evenings entertainment.Whether you're visiting Rijeka and the Kvarner region or Pula and the Istrian peninsula, don't miss these spectacular shows in a spectacular setting, presented by Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka

The beauty of Pula is that it packs in 3,000 years of history and sights, from classic Roman to cutting-edge contemporary, within a space of under one square kilometre. It can be explored in an hour or two. Or, when there’s a festival taking place, a whole day which may well run late into the evening. The most iconic starting point is, of course, the Amphitheatre, known as the Arena. It was built in the 1st century AD during the reign of Emperor Vespasian, at the same time as the magnificent Colosseum in Rome. But while the Colosseum in Rome all too rarely hosts concerts (and when it does, they’re located outside), the Arena is still very much part of Pula’s cultural landscape. All summer long the biggest names in popular music – Luciano Pavarotti, Elton John, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Massive Attack, Grace Jones, Sting – perform within its near intact walled ring. Since 1954, the Pula Film Festival has been held here. In fact, the Arena forms part of its logo, the venue now synonymous with an event that once attracted the likes of Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor. In more recent times, the Arena has also hosted the opening night of the Outlook and Dimensions festivals offer world-renowned acts from the genres of dubstep, techno, hip hop and drum ‘n’ bass. In 2018, the festival added another site to its roster: nearby Zerostrasse. Accessed along Carrarina, this series of tunnels was built to protect Pula citizens during air raids, originally for World War I but also f

‘He chose an island in the Adriatic, not far off the Istrian coast… But the air was heavy, it rained, the hotel guests were provincial and Austrian, and he missed that close, calming contact with the sea that only a beach of soft sand can provide. It wasn’t exactly the place he had been looking for.’Thus begins the holiday of middle-aged professor Gustav von Aschenbach, protagonist of Thomas Mann’s celebrated novella Death in Venice. By far the best-known literary description of the Istrian island of Brijuni, it is hardly the glowing endorsement the local tourist board might have wanted. Thomas Mann visited Brijuni with his wife in May 1911, but soon tired of the place and headed for the city of canals and gondolas instead. Here Mann came across the people and places that inspired the rest of his story. And instead of writing a book that might have gone down in history as Life on Brijuni, he wrote Death in Venice instead. The idea of a grumpy old Mann fleeing everyone else’s idea of paradise is an appropriately ambiguous introduction to Istria’s fleeting presence in world literature. The peninsula certainly boasts enough bookish references to keep the guide-book writers happy: fourteenth-century scribe Dante mentions the scattered graveyards of Pula in the Divine Comedy, Jules Verne uses Pazin as a location in his 1885 adventure Mathias Sandorf, and James Joyce famously spent the winter of 1904-5 teaching English to Austrian navy officers in Pula. However Dante lived a rat