Ninety seconds on Venetian Palaces of Perast
The dated plaques on the walls are the whole exhibit. Sixteen to nineteen of them line one street, depending on what counts as a palace, and the only interior open without a room booked is the town museum.
Perast contains some 17 baroque and Renaissance palaces built between the 16th and 18th centuries by wealthy sea captains and merchants. Notable examples include the Bujović Palace and the Smekja Palace, most fronting the main waterfront street.
The street does the work. They face onto it in a line, built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries by families who made their money fitting out ships for Venice, and the significant ones carry a marked and dated red sign so the sequence can be followed without a guide. Bujovic stands at the western end, a portico of five rusticated arches under a first floor terrace, and it is the town museum. Smekja is the grandest of them, put up in 1764 out of white stone quarried on Korcula and now a hotel. Zmajevic is the third the sources name. The rest are read off their walls, some restored to the stone and some still shuttered.
Explore the rest of Perast
Baroque palace of 1694 on the waterfront, now the town museum with maritime portraits, weapons, flags and captains' possessions from…
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