Istria in 4 days

An island until 1763, its lanes spiral up to St Euphemia's Church and a 60-metre bell tower modelled on St Mark's in Venice.

A UNESCO-listed 6th-century complex built under Bishop Euphrasius, whose apse keeps gold-ground Byzantine mosaics of the Virgin among angels and local saints.

A stone hill village almost abandoned in the 1960s, then repopulated by artists who restored houses in return for studios; it now has thirty galleries.

A walled hilltop village whose Venetian ramparts take twenty minutes to walk, above the Motovun forest where white truffles are found from October to January.

Hum claims to be the world's smallest town, reached from Roč by a road lined with eleven stone monuments to the Glagolitic alphabet.

Fourteen islands off Fažana, a national park since 1983, where Tito spent his summers and received heads of state, whose gifts stocked a safari park.

The sixth-largest surviving Roman amphitheatre, built under Vespasian, unusual because its three-storey outer wall still stands to its full 32 metres.

Istria's southern tip, a nature reserve of low cliffs to jump from, clear coves, fossilised dinosaur footprints and some thirty species of orchid.