Seductive Split brings history alive

Dubrovnik interested me, but Split seduced me.

If Venice and Florence had a secret love child, then abandoned it to grow up in the ruins of ancient Rome, you'd get Split. It's gorgeous and haunting. Compact. Beautiful and mysterious. A place where the margins between the present and the distant past seem very slim indeed.

This magical time-shifting is most obvious in the peristyle, a rectangular public space at the heart of the old palace that forms the historic town centre. (I hadn't fully appreciated the reality until I got here. I knew the palace of Diocletian was in Split; I didn't grasp that the old town was actually in the palace.) In the peristyle, the Emperor Diocletian's visitors would have found a magnificent garden surrounded by a colonnade of towering columns of various colours, assembled to show the rich variety of empire. The greatest glories of the palace connected here. To the right, the temple of Jupiter (whose incarnation Diocletian claimed to be on Earth). To the left, the magnificent octagonal mausoleum that would someday take his earthly body. Straight ahead, a round vestibule where Diocletian would receive visitors, draped in imperial purple and haloed by light that came in from windows aligned to the sunrise and sunset, then bounced off gold-leaf covered walls.

It's a little less showy these days, but all those elements survive. The peristyle is now a rectangular piazza known as Split's living room. The garden is long gone, now paved with white stone buffed to a mirror-like sheen by centuries of foot traffic. The mausoleum now stands, but as what must be one of the world's smallest cathedrals. The vestibule is an echoing ruin, now often occupied by musicians entertaining tourists and flogging CDs. Buildings have completely filled in the West side of the peristyle's colonnade, dominated by a bar and restaurant called Luxor. Their cushions cover the stone steps. While most visitors followed their guides through here, stopping, snapping photos, then moving on, we settled here at least once a day for cold beer and hot people watching. As dusk falls and the tour groups disappear, it's a magical place to while away the hours.

Tours aren't a bad idea, however. Beautiful as the old town is, it can be hard to piece its story together from your own observation. Informative guidebooks are remarkably absent. You can by a copy of Diocletian's palace modelled in white chocolate, but good luck finding one of those books that superimposes a coloured acetate onto a modern photo to give you a picture of then and now. There are a handful of plaques up on buildings, but nobody has bothered with a city trail that allows you to navigate around the old town's lanes understanding how they started. We hired history teacher Dino Ivancic to make it real for us. (Approx. £95 for two hours.)

Dino is either a remarkably good judge of character or an acquired taste to be approached with caution. I'm going to guess it's the former; he figured we already had a good understanding of basic history, were comfortable with wry wit and a bit of ribald humour. The resulting tour was half serious explanation, half history-based stand-up routine channelling Monty Python and Blackadder. So I didn't get quite the level of Roman history and architecture I would have liked (probably to the relief of my friends) but we were richly amused.

After a short walk out to the harbour to get a look at the full span of the palace walls, we plunged into its most remarkable feature. The basement. Yes, really. In order to level a sloping site, and put Diocletian's private apartments safely above sea level, the architects built an impressive sub-structure of lofty arched and domed rooms that matched the pattern of the palace above. The "barbarians" who moved in after the fall of empire couldn't figure out the underfloor heating, and thought the subterranean spaces would be more useful as cesspits. Their shocking mis-use of the space led to its preservation; the rooms weren't dug out by archeologists until the late 20th century, providing new understanding of the palace above and lots of museum-worthy artefacts that had been entombed in the mire.

All visitors get some exposure to these cellars as they walk from the main harbour-side entrance up to the peristyle. Craftspeople have set their stalls up here to form a picturesque shopping mall on the main tourist route. But for a small fee you can ramble though the whole atmospheric complex. Game of Thrones fans will get an extra thrill discovering the sets where Daenerys incarcerated her dragons and Barristan Selmy met his death.

Back up top, guides like Dino help you to decipher what the place looked like in the 3rd century and how it would have functioned in Diocletian's time. For example, standing us at the Iron (Western) gate today the path narrows quickly into a lane between shops. He pointed out the telltale marks in walls that reveal the width of the original road; the decumanus, where ten soldiers could walk abreast. Dino showed us how more modern centuries layered onto the Roman world, borrowing walls and integrating bits of ancient sculpture into their decor. He also exposed us to the historic Jewish quarter, not much mentioned in official guides. Similar to stories we heard in Dubrovnik, the people of Split didn't care much about religious differences as long as everyone made a good profit. This was a point of refuge for Jews getting kicked out of Spain at the time of the Inquisition, and Split boasts one of Europe's oldest continuously operating synagogues.

After leaving Dino we looped back to go inside the cathedral and the temple of Jupiter (joint admission ticket). Both are magnificent buildings. I found the cathedral both amusing and fascinating for its layering of the pagan and Christian. The frieze around the top, thankfully far too lofty for iconoclastic early Christians to do damage, has a shockingly profane theme of putti enjoying earthly delights of drinking and hunting. No doubt exactly what Diocletian planned to be doing in the afterlife. Successive generations have added a magnificent pulpit (very medieval Tuscan in style); pointy gothic side altars, a wildly opulent baroque altar that's a masterpiece of marble inlay work and a rather distracting choir. Despite all of this, it's still a resolutely Roman interior.

The temple of Jupiter, now the Baptistry, has seen less tampering. Other than a baptismal font cobbled together from gorgeous early Christian altar panels (almost Viking in their sinuous abstraction) and a hideous modern sculpture of John the Baptist, the space has been left bare. All the better to appreciate one of the most magnificent ceilings still intact from the ancient world. It's a coffered barrel vault, each coffer with a different decorative element at its centre and glorious foliage around its edges, held up by a ridiculously ornate, multi-levelled cornice. (Photo above) It was so magnificent I paid to see it twice.

For a separate fee you can clamber up the bell tower outside the cathedral. If its lines look a bit sleek, despite its Romanesque design, you're right to spot an aberration. It's one of the most modern things inside the place walls, being a 1908 reconstruction of an earlier tower that came down in an earthquake. I thought about this a lot as I made the vertigo-inducing climb. Pierced by stories of arched windows and entirely empty inside, the tower is ascended by metal stairs bolted to the interior walls. With nothing between the stair treads. Climbing feels like you're hovering in mid air. Descending is even worse. And I don't have an issue with heights. The view from the top is worth it. Be brave.

Streets immediately outside the palace walls are a pleasing melange of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Neo-Classical. Many old palaces have a decidedly Venetian feel about them, with twisted columns and fanciful pointed windows. There's even an enormous piazza loosely based on St. Marks, with one side open to take in sea views. (Locals tend to drink here rather than in the peristyle). Other bits feel like you're deep in Tuscany (particularly the decidedly un-Italian sounding Narodni Trg square). There's a magnificent fruit and veg market out the Eastern gate and a fish market out the West; both will make foodies wish they had a kitchen.

Despite the antiquity, Split feels like a vibrant, modern town. Squares and restaurants are full of locals. Children play ball in the streets. There are trendy wine bars with rooftop gardens. We found restaurants we'd welcome, and repeatedly visit, if they existed in London. (Of that, more in my next story.) The shopping scene goes far beyond the expected tourist items; Split is packed with boutiques with locally designed clothes, dramatic jewellery and stand-out accessories. Most were a bit too high fashion for my style, but window shopping was a joy and we all agreed that the women of Split were some of the most fashionable of any city we'd ever visited. People watching was a catwalk show with good architecture.

There's no doubt this is a living city, not a stage set for tourists. That was obvious when we got out of town for our wine tour at Kovac. From Anton's vineyards we could see the sprawl of a very big, very busy place. "All the creative industries are here," our tour guide Andrea told me. "Government and the law are in Zagreb. Dubrovnik lives on tourists. We make things."

It's also a jumping off point for additional exploration. We gazed enviously at the day trips we wouldn't have time to take. Excursions inland to a national park famed for waterfalls. Jaunts to islands with exquisite beaches and picturesque towns. Winery tours (we'd done one, but there were more to be sampled.) The Medieval town of Mostar, just over the border in Bosnia, with its legendary bridge. Even Dubrovnik was accessible from here. The more I learned of Split, the more I marvelled that Dubrovnik is the go-to destination for most visitors to Croatia. This is the place I'd want to come back to, and use as a base for a longer holiday.

One of my great heroes felt the same way. If we dropped back two centuries ... still fairly modern for Split ... we'd find it a star on an extended Grand Tour trail thanks to now-legendary architect Robert Adam. In 1764 he'd printed a lavishly illustrated guide to the Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia. The first few pages are packed with the names of the aristocrats who subscribed to fund its production, topped with the king and queen. Thanks to a digitisation project at the University of Wisconsin, you can follow the preceding link to look at the whole thing online. Exquisite drawings go into obsessive detail showing architectural features that are, for the most part, still there and on regular view. He includes more "modern" fortifications and neo-classical buildings as well. Though scholarship has moved our understanding on since Adam's time (he believed the Mausoleum was the Temple of Jupiter, and the Temple of Jupiter one to Aesculapius) the  power and the beauty of the architecture hasn't changed.

And it will all look very familiar. Because this was one of the source books Adam used in his designs for the grand buildings of London and aristocratic country houses across Britain. Which were then copied across the world in government buildings, museums and grand residences. The creative spark we found in Split has travelled the world; most people just aren't aware of it. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys history and architecture to spend time here. They'll fall in love.