Dubrovnik: The city as a work of art

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Sarah Lawson explores a beautiful corner of Croatia

Dubrovnik lies at the southern end of the Croatian seacoast due east of the bootstrap of Italy, and it is a vest-pocket city, an open-air walk-in art installation. The walls, four to six metres thick on the landward side and displaying an impressive collection of bastions, forts, crenellations, gunports, portcullis slots and gates, undulate from one strongpoint to another, rising far above the tile roofs and lemon trees only to swoop low at the harbour and ascend again along the south side of the city, where they stand firmly on the rocky shoreline.

Once inside the walls at the Pila Gate, you are standing at the west end of the main thoroughfare, Placa, also called Stradun (an old Venetian dialect word meaning a big street), which runs east to the two harbour gates. It marks the place where a channel separated the island fortress of Ragusa from the town on the mainland, Dubrovnik, until they were united in the 12th century. Now Placa is a marble-like cambered surface, and whether it is a street or an elongated piazza is a matter of personal preference. Straight down the Placa is a fine bell tower, the Renaissance Rector’s Palace, and the entrances to the harbour. From one end to the other is a stroll of scarcely more than five minutes.

This Stradun is like the bar of a barbell, for at each end open spaces with wells balance each other. The Big Onofrio Fountain at the Pila end also serves as a large reservoir and the Little Onofrio Fountain at the harbour end is as decorative as it is useful. Both fountains and the aqueduct that supplies them were built by the Neapolitan Onofrio della Cava in the mid-15th century.

 Although the tour guide may compare the city lay-out to a fish skeleton with the spine down the middle and side streets going off it like ribs, I see it with a different simile. The shape of Dubrovnik is like the lop-sided hull of a flat-bottomed boat: the Placa is the keel and the streets rising up on both sides are the ribs, topped by the city walls as gunwales.

 The buildings along the Placa and elsewhere were rebuilt after the earthquake of 1667, and so the city, dating from at least the 7th century, looks younger than it is. The Placa is lined with uniform merchants’ houses still used for commercial purposes and separated by narrow side streets each about two metres wide.

The stone structures are softened here and there by potted trees or climbing plants. Balconies are not as common as you might expect, but sometimes there is a light platform for flowerpots, and so a bright geranium contrasts against a dark green shutter or a cream-coloured wall. On a sunny day when the Bora is blowing down the coast from the north, the streets of Dubrovnik are striped with deep shade and clear light. The rich blue sky contrasts with the limestone buildings and orange tile roofs, and at the harbour the water is a matching intense blue. Even without the literal movement of people and pigeons, busy little terriers and calculating cats, there seems to be a rhythm in the patterns of light and shade and colour where the Placa and the relatively wide parallel Od Puca Street are crossed by shady alleys.

 Dubrovnik is one of those cities where the distinction between ‘street’ and ‘restaurant’ is not at all clear. Similarly, the difference between ‘street’ and ‘flight of steps’ can be extremely vague with a great deal of overlap. In sunny places such as GundulićSquare and Buniceva Square the restaurant tables and chairs invite you to sit and become part of the furniture of the city.

 On walls and over gateways the patron saint, St Vlaho (or Blaise), stands guard over the city, often symbolically holding a small model of Dubrovnik in his left hand. Dubrovnik is rich in ecclesiastical buildings. The Franciscan monastery flanks the Pila Gate on the north side with the convent and orphanage of St Clare facing it on the south side. The Dominican monastery fits into the northeast corner by the Ploče Gate. Both monasteries have charming cloisters. The city boasts a large baroque Jesuit church and several smaller churches and chapels, plus an imposing Serbian Orthodox church, a synagogue, and a small mosque.

 The cathedral is actually dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin, but St Vlaho has quite a grand church within a short distance, built in the Roman Baroque style with statuary ranged on balustrades and pediments around the roof and an extravagant pediment over the north door.

One charm of this outdoor walk-in installation is that it contains others, like Russian dolls. The city has indoor areas, too – great ecclesiastical and administrative spaces - that contain further art. There is the old Sponza Palace where invaluable archives are stored. Its main fabric and arcading date from well before the disastrous earthquake of 1667. The nearby Rector’s Palace exhibits both Gothic and Neo-classical windows: flamboyant Gothic in the front elevation and austere classicism on the south side.

The cathedral has relatively bare interior walls and pillars, but the main altar and the side chapels boast pictures and statuary with exuberant Baroque movement. The organ loft in the cathedral is particularly ornate; the architect seems to have pulled out all the stops, as it were.

The narrow, slightly curving side streets and unexpected sunny squares have an artless charm that perhaps only urban Northerners find so entrancing. If you wake up to this every morning perhaps you see only the neighbours’ washing and the worrying state of your drains. Still, the creamy buildings rising above the stone-paved street, the ancient pediments and weather-worn stone masks, the green louvred shutters creased in the middle to let the air in and to keep the sun out, like a cat flap for the weather. Taken all together Dubrovnik is a semi-directed, semi-accidental, collaborative work of art.