Pula Ancient City

Pula's Roman history is written directly into its street plan. The city stands at the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula, wrapped around a deep natural harbour and spread across seven low hills, and with a population of just over 52,000 it is the largest town in Istria. It became a Roman colony between 46 and 45 BC, was demolished for backing the losing side in the civil war that followed Caesar's assassination, then rebuilt and renamed Colonia Pietas Iulia Pola Pollentia Herculanea — a mouthful that survives today simply as Pula.

The Arena

The city's landmark is the Pula Arena, an amphitheatre begun under Augustus and finished around 80 AD under Vespasian and Titus — built from local limestone, standing nearly 30 metres high, and one of the few Roman arenas anywhere with all four corner towers still intact. It could once hold something like 23,000 spectators; today it hosts concerts and film screenings instead of gladiators. Its axes measure 132.5 by 105.1 metres, and because it was built against a slope facing the water, the outer wall rises through three storeys on the seaward side and only two on the landward side. Each of the four towers held cisterns of scented water that could be sprinkled over the crowd.

That it survived at all is close to luck. Stone was being carted off the building as early as the fifth century, and the plundering only stopped when the patriarch of Aquileia banned it in the thirteenth. In 1583 the Venetian Senate debated dismantling the amphitheatre altogether and re-erecting it in Venice; the proposal was voted down, and a plaque inside still commemorates the senator who argued against it. Serious restoration began under French occupation in the early nineteenth century and was carried on from 1816 by the architect Pietro Nobile. The underground passages that once held animals and equipment now house a permanent exhibition on olive oil and wine production in Roman Istria, with reconstructed presses and storage jars.

Temple, Arch and Gates

A short walk away is the Temple of Augustus, a Corinthian temple built in the decades around the turn of the millennium and dedicated to the first Roman emperor — damaged in World War II and later rebuilt, it now houses a small collection of Roman sculpture. It stands on the ancient forum, still the city's main square, and was dedicated jointly to Augustus and the goddess Roma; an Allied bomb destroyed it in 1944, and it was put back together between 1945 and 1947.

The Arch of the Sergii (also called the Golden Gate), raised around 27 BC to honour three brothers of the Sergius family connected to the naval battle of Actium, and the Twin Gates, a 2nd–3rd century town gate that was buried for defensive reasons in the Middle Ages and only excavated in modern times, round out the main Roman sites within easy walking distance of each other. The arch was paid for privately by Salvia Postuma Sergi, a woman of the family, and originally stood against the city wall rather than free in the open. Pula had ten gates in all; another survivor, the Gate of Hercules, carries the names of the two Roman officials credited with founding the colony.

After Rome

Pula's history didn't stop with Rome — Byzantines, Venetians, centuries under Austrian rule, then a period under Italy before joining Croatia after the Second World War, each left some mark on the city. Venice held it from the twelfth century until the republic fell in 1797, and the star-shaped Kaštel fortress on the hill above the old town dates from that era, designed in the seventeenth century by the French military engineer Antoine de Ville and now home to the Historical and Maritime Museum of Istria. Under the Habsburgs the town changed again: from 1859 it served as the principal naval base of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which built the shipyard, the barracks and much of the housing that still defines the modern centre. Italian administration followed from 1918, and the city passed to Yugoslavia in 1947.

Between the Ruins and the Coast

Fishing and small-scale shipbuilding are still part of the local economy today, alongside the tourism that the Roman sites and the Adriatic coastline now bring in. The Roman core is compact enough to cover on foot in half a day, and the amphitheatre doubles as a summer venue for the city's film festival and for open-air concerts. South of town the coastline breaks up into the coves and pine-backed cliffs of the Kamenjak headland, while the Brijuni archipelago lies a short way up the coast to the north-west. Between the ruins and the coast, many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Croatia coast.