The day dawned bright and calm. The wind dropped late yesterday evening and did not return, which was good news for us but not for the windsurfers. Windsurfing would not be as exciting today as it was yesterday.
The campsite did not have a bus timetable and there was not one at the bus stop in the village, so I asked the lady in the bakers about the buses when I bought the bread yesterday. She thought that the buses for Pula were every half an hour, starting at 07:15 or 07:30. We arrived at 08:40 this morning but no bus had appeared by 09:00, so I enquired at the kiosk on the square. The next bus was at 10:00 – so much for “every half an hour”! We spent the intervening time exploring the village and the bus turned up as predicted. Less than half an hour later we were in the centre of Pula, carefully noting the times of the buses for the return journey!
Pula has been an important settlement since prehistoric times and the centre of the town is a hill that was originally a neolithic hill fort. None of this remains as a large Venetian fort now occupies the area and this was preceded by a Roman fort. As with many Roman towns, Roman remains are uncovered anywhere where a hole is dug and we saw three areas in Pula where roadworks had uncovered Roman walls. Whilst walking around the town we came across exposed Roman finds left where they had been found – in the car park, children's playground (obviously a Roman cemetery judging from the sarcophagi) and a park. The cathedral had used Roman stone in its construction and its bell tower and the Venetian fort were built from stones taken from the amphitheatre.
The amphitheatre was very impressive, rising to three stories on the sea side and two stories on the land side. Most of the interior stone had been removed to be used in the construction of buildings in Pula. It must have been very tempting as an extremely convenient source of ready-prepared and high-quality building stone. Up to the 15th century it had been intact – lasting nearly 1,400 years after it was built in 79 AD by Vespasian.
The archaeological museum had some excellent finds but was not well documented. We were surprised and dismayed to find that the ground floor (lapidary – inscribed, decorated stones and statues) had no descriptions in any language. We had no idea of the age of these articles on where they had been found. I decided to invest 30 kn (£3) in a guidebook so that we knew what we were looking at. Having done that, we found that the other floors did have some English narration but it was still quite poor. One site, Nesactium, stood out in the museum both in the prehistoric and Roman sections. There were beautiful finds from both periods on display. I had already noticed that this site was not far from our campsite, so we decided to plan a visit to it for the next day.
The Temple of Romae and Augustus (1st century AD) was still standing in a square that used to be the Roman Forum and it appeared that the Town Hall next to it had used part of a similar Roman building.
The Arch of the Sergii (1st century BC) looked very impressive when lit in the early evening.
So after a day of archaeology, it was back to Henrietta for a Greco-Roman meal of Stifado and pasta!
As we left the bus in the village square, 10 minutes walk from the campsite we heard drums. It turned out that this was a sound check for the band that was entertaining the windsurfers that evening. By the time that we got to the sea, just across the very small bay from the peninsular where the band marquee was situated, it was very loud. If we had been at home and I was listening to music at that volume, Jane would have said “do you think that we could have the volume down a bit?”. When we got back inside the van, the volume was just right and we enjoyed the snatches of 'Another Brick in the Wall'. We thought that we would be listening to it all evening but as I write this as 22:30, we haven't heard any more music.
Photos: Amphitheatre exterior; Amphitheatre interior; Arch of the Sergii at night.
No comments:
Post a Comment