Part 4

Monday 30 May 2011

Trieste - Piran - Rovinj: 122km  (76 miles)

We have breakfast again in the well designed breakfast room of Urban Hotel Design in Triest. This is followed by coffee on the Piazza Unita Italiana at Cafè degli Specchi. After coffee we ask the hotel receptionist to have our car fetched by the valet parking service. It takes another 15 minutes for the car to arrive in front of the hotel. Our SatNav guides us out of the city through a maze of tunnels and underpasses. It leads us to the motorway to Slovenia. We pass the border without a hitch. In this part of Slovenia most of the road signs are bilingual too: Italian and Slovenian. We drive to Piran or Pirano, an old Venetian town on the Slovenian coast. We get there via Koper, a larger town with a waterfront lined with large hotels and casinos. It does not look appealing at all. 

Piran on the other hand is a lovely and small scale town. It is perched on the tip of a peninsula on which hundreds of houses have been crammed together. All have those pittoresque red tiled roof tops. We park the car at a multistorey car park just outside the old town from where a free shuttle bus takes us to the central square: the Tartinjev trg or Piazza Tartini. We get off the bus and have a cappucino at one of the café's lining the square. The square holds the town's major buildings, among which the town hall, the law courts and a church. On the town hall we see the striking Venetian coat of arms: a winged lion and an open book, the symbol of Saint Mark the evangelist, the patron saint of Venice. Also the San Pietro church is here, a small church with few attractions. Like in so many Slovenian churches we are only allowed a peek inside through a iron grille in order to keep looters and vandals out. In the middle of the square stands a statue of the 18th century violinist Tartini (1692-1770). He was born in Pirano, but celebrated his success in Padua where he lies buried. We walk along the central axis, made up of winding alleyways towards the 1 May Square. Here four statues stand guard at a water basin, constructed in the 18th century after a long period of drought, in order catch any rain. We walk on towards the very tip of the peninsula where we see an old light house. Attached to it is a medieval church dedicated to Our Lady of Health. The church is in a bad state.  We carry on along the concrete beach and the nice boulevard and then uphill towards the San Giorgio church, that looks out over the old town. Connected to the church is the Campanile or bell tower, built after the example of the Campanile in Venice, Pirano's mother city. I climb the tower for €1. The view is impressive and takes in the entire old town, its surroundings and the Adriatic sea. We walk back towards the square to have a snack before we board the free shuttle back to our car.

We leave  Piran in direction of the Croatian border.

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