Heading Home This Morning, To and From Rovinj (Rovigno), Croatia

The basilica of St Euphemia and its campanile crown the old town of Rovinj

Assiduously attended by a rowdy retinue of gulls, a fishing boat (above) returns early this morning to its home port of Rovinj after a night out on the Adriatic--just as we were leaving on a large catamaran-style ferry for our own home in Venice. If the campanile in the image looks a little familiar, it's no surprise, as it was intended to the evoke the one in Piazza San Marco. In 1283 Rovinj became the Istrian jewel of the Venetian Republic and there are reminders of this long association--in the form of lions, in the Italian spoken by a good number of its residents, in its bilingual signs and its Italian alias Rovigno--all over.

Nowadays the two cities are linked by daily ferries, and a pleasant 3 to 3 1/2 hour voyage takes you from the end of Venice's Zattere to the port of Rovinj, beside its old town. The schedule of the ferries--which leave Rovinj at 7 am and leave Venice at 5:30 pm--are clearly oriented toward day-trippers from Croatia, intent on joining the 75% of visitors to Venice who stay no more than a few hours. In fact, because you arrive at Rovinj at 9 pm from Venice, and the next ferry leaves in the early morning, you might conceivably make a "night trip" and enjoy Rovinj's less expensive restaurants and bars, but a day trip proper is out of the question. In the next couple of posts though, I'll suggest that 2 nights in Rovinj (or the nearby port town of Porec, also served by ferries) for someone staying a longer time in Venice makes more sense than the more common jaunt of a few hours made by someone staying in Rovinj.

But having awakened this morning at 5 am to catch the boat back to Venice, I'll leave more on that for tomorrow.