Rovinj Heritage Museum

What makes it special

Look up from the square before you go in. The Palazzo Califfi rises four storeys in red, with four rows of rectangular windows set in strict symmetry, a stone portal at street level and a Baroque balcony on the second floor. It went up in the late seventeenth century, and it is one of the finest Baroque buildings in Istria.

On the first and second floors the palace keeps its Venetian plan, a larger central hall flanked by smaller rooms. On each floor you walk from the central hall into the side rooms and back, so it feels more like a house than a gallery.

The old masters on the second floor are the strength of the place, the best holding of Italian art in Istria. Renaissance work by the Venetian Giovanni Bellini hangs there beside paintings from the school of Bonifazio de Pitati.

The modern rooms matter just as much to the museum, whose emphasis is its contemporary collection. Look for work by Vidović, Gliha, Picelj and Motika on the floor below the Italians.

Visiting

Starting upstairs with the old masters, you can take the floor below at a quicker pace: it holds Croatian art from the later twentieth century. The museum owns about fifteen thousand works, far more than its rooms can carry, so what hangs at any one time is a rotating slice.

Temporary shows take up part of the space. This year that includes Selected, an archaeology show drawn from sites around Rovinj, which runs to the end of December. If you are coming for one particular painting, look it up first in the museum's online catalogue, where the digitised holdings can be browsed.

Tips

Keep the museum for a hot late afternoon or one of Rovinj's rare wet days, when the evening session is open. It fits neatly between the beach and dinner.

If the permanent rooms matter more to you than the current show, give yourself time upstairs and leave the floor below for the end. Look closely at the Bellini before you move on: it is the one painting in the building worth crossing Rovinj for.