Split

Our first day in Split. Breakfast is taken in the small courtyard outside the hotel. An excellent breakfast sit with a good range of fresh fruit and hot and cold dishes.

It was a huge relief when we found the hotel last night. It is inside the Palace of Diacletian. The whole of the interior is pedestrianised, so the taxi dropped us at the east Gate and gave us instructions on how to get to the hotel. In Roman time the roads would have been wide and the layout easy to follow. In mediaeval time buildings invaded these wide roads and the orderly systematic Roman layout has been partially lost.

Inevitably we quickly lost out bearings and any sense of direction. The interior of the palace is now a maze of tiny narrow streets. The builds are high, and the map on the phone cannot get an accurate bearing on where it is. I went into a restaurant, they gave me a map and showed me how to get to the hotel, it was very close. Two minutes later I was lost again. I went in to a shop, they phoned the hotel to get instructions on the best route, at this point we were probably less than 50 metres from the hotel. We set out once again, we found ourselves in the peristil of the Palace where a musician was playing. We new where we were at this point, and for the next half hour or so this was the closest we got to the hotel.

Eventually we found the hotel an got checked in. It took us longer to walk a hundred metres or so than it had taken us from landing to get to the Palace. After this saga we had a light cold meal at a restaurant in the Piazza in front of the hotel. We were not going to venture further afield and risk getting lost again.

The hotel is on a love small piazza next to the Temple of Jupiter, which is beautifully preserved and built of white limestone. It looks as I imagine many of the temples in Rome must have looked when they still had their white marble cladding.

After a morning admiring the coast and harbour area we went on a walking tour in the afternoon. We were a group of five, unlike many of the other walking tours we saw that seemed to comprise 20 or more people. Lots of information about the Roman part of the city and its subsequent evolution, some of which I maybe still remember.