Janury 27, 2018
The skies are clear and beautiful as I type this, a little hungover from researching Slovenian wine, but glad to have found a home in this part of the world, and happier yet the winter is passing, the days getting longer, and eating ice cream in public becoming an ever more viable option. It’s on days like these one’s thoughts turn to the coast, and the possibility that this year, for sure, we’ll be beach-body ready for the season, the indulgences of winter worked out and off, with an ascent of Mount Triglav already planned somewhere near the end of the third bottle.
Until then, this week’s dive in the archives has pulled out a set of images from Piran, Tartini Square to be exact, which, as this first image shows, wasn’t always dry land.
The dock that became a square, sometime in the late 19th century
In fact, it was dock, one that became ringed by important buildings, the users of which eventually became sick of the smell of the sewage and waste that accumulated in the waters there. The area was thus filled and the square was born in 1894, with the monument to Tartini being set there two years later.
The monument to Tartini, 1900
The square is named after Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770), a composer who was born in Piran when it was part of the republic of Venice, and is the first recorded owner of a Stradivarius (the one now known as the Lipinski Stradivarius). It was this violin that Tartini saw the devil play in a dream, which then led him to write the Devil's Trill Sonata.
But enough of the background and music, and on with more images of the square over the years.
1900
1908
1910
1910
1910
1910
1915
1961
1969 - Wikimedia - FOTO:FORTEPAN - Romák Éva
1976. Wikimedia - FOTO:FORTEPAN - Urbán Tamás
2009. Wikimedia - © Plamen Agov • studiolemontree.com CC 3.0
