The concept of a living city inside a Roman palace sounds like the premise of a historical novel. In Split, it is simply Tuesday. Diocletian’s Palace — built between 295 and 305 AD by the Roman Emperor Diocletian as his retirement complex on the Dalmatian coast — is not a ruin, not a museum, not an archaeological site fenced off from the city around it. It is a neighbourhood. Approximately 3,000 people live inside its walls, in apartments and houses built into and above and between the Roman structures over seventeen centuries of continuous habitation. The palace’s mausoleum became a Christian cathedral in the 7th century and has been one ever since, with the emperor’s sarcophagus replaced by a Christian altar under the same Roman dome. The Roman cellars beneath the central peristyle square are bars and restaurants and galleries. The peristyle itself — the colonnaded central courtyard of the palace — is the city’s main square, where people eat lunch and drink coffee and argue and watch street performers, as they have been doing in some form since Diocletian walked across it sixteen centuries ago. Split is the most continuously inhabited Roman building in the world, and the experience of walking through it — moving between a Roman colonnade and a medieval Venetian tower and a 20th-century apartment building in the space of fifty metres — is unlike anything else in Europe.

The Palace: How to Walk Through Sixteen Centuries at Once

The correct way to arrive in Split’s palace is through the Golden Gate (Porta Aurea) on the northern wall — the main ceremonial entrance, restored to something close to its original grandeur, with the 10th-century statue of the medieval Croatian bishop Gregory of Nin (whose big toe is polished bright by the hands of everyone who has touched it for luck) standing just outside. From the Golden Gate, the Cardo (the north-south axis of the Roman palace, now a medieval street of shops and restaurants) leads south through the palace interior, past the vestibule (the domed anteroom to the imperial apartments, open to the sky for seventeen centuries and now acoustically extraordinary for the a cappella singing that local performers conduct inside it for the resonance) to the peristyle, the central heart of the palace. The peristyle is where the Roman architecture is most intact and most dramatic: the granite columns of the colonnade, quarried in Egypt and shipped across the Mediterranean, still standing at their original height on three sides of the square, with the Cathedral of Saint Domnius — Diocletian’s mausoleum, converted to a church, now the oldest cathedral building in the world — on the fourth side. Climb the cathedral’s Romanesque bell tower for the view across the palace rooftops and out to the Adriatic. Descend into the cellars below the peristyle — vast underground spaces that mirror the floor plan of the imperial apartments above them — for the most atmospheric and least crowded section of the whole palace complex. The eastern Iron Gate, the western Silver Gate (now used as a vegetable market), and the southern Sea Gate (opening directly onto the Riva waterfront promenade) are the other exits and entrances of a palace that functions as a small city within a larger one, and walking the circuit of all four gates along the original Roman walls gives you the full measure of what Diocletian built here in the early 4th century.

The Islands, the Ferry, and What the Adriatic Provides

Split’s greatest advantage as a base on the Dalmatian coast is its position as the hub of the central Adriatic ferry network. From Split’s ferry terminal, regular services run to Brač (one hour), Hvar (one hour), Vis (two hours), Korčula (three hours), and the outer islands of the archipelago, making the city the natural base for a Dalmatian island-hopping trip rather than simply a destination in itself. Brač is the island most immediately accessible — the beach at Zlatni Rat, a sand and pebble tongue that extends into the Adriatic and shifts shape with the current, is one of the most photographed beaches in Croatia and deserves its reputation for its setting if not always for its crowds. Hvar is the island that gets the international lifestyle press attention — the old town is genuinely beautiful, a medieval Venetian square above a harbour full of expensive yachts in summer — but is also, in July and August, significantly overcrowded. Vis is the island that serious travellers prefer: the most remote of the easily accessible Dalmatian islands, with no airport, car access only by ferry, a fishing port aesthetic unchanged by mass tourism, and the best food on the Dalmatian coast — the black risotto (crni rižot), the grilled fish from the daily catch, the local Vugava white wine grown on the island’s limestone vineyards. The Blue Cave on the island of Biševo, accessible by boat from Vis, is one of the most extraordinary natural spectacles in the Adriatic: a sea cave where the refraction of sunlight through an underwater opening illuminates the interior with blue light of an intensity and colour that sounds fictional until you are inside it.

The Food, the Wine, and the Peka

Dalmatian food is Croatian food at its most Mediterranean and its most honest: fresh fish from the Adriatic, olive oil from the island groves, lamb from the Dalmatian hinterland, and the peka — the cooking method that is the most characteristically Dalmatian preparation of all. The peka (pronounced peh-kah) is a domed iron or clay lid placed over meat or fish and vegetables, buried under hot embers and coals, and left to slow-cook for two to three hours until the meat is falling from the bone and the juices have reduced to a concentrated sauce. It produces lamb, octopus, chicken, and veal of extraordinary tenderness and depth, and it is the preparation that every Dalmatian family cooks for Sunday lunch and that every good restaurant in Split cooks to order — which means ordering it well in advance, because the peka cannot be rushed. Order it when you make your reservation, specify whether you want lamb or octopus or both, and eat it with the house wine and the bread that the restaurant makes to soak up the cooking juices, because the juices from a good peka are the best argument for bread’s existence. The fish restaurants of the Varoš neighbourhood, on the western edge of the Old Town, are where Split’s most serious seafood eating happens: small family-run konobe that have been serving grilled fish and black risotto and scampi buzara (scampi in white wine, garlic, and olive oil sauce) for decades, at prices that still reflect the fact that their primary customers are local rather than tourists. The Pazar market, outside the eastern Silver Gate, is where Split shops: the farmers from the Dalmatian hinterland and the islands with their produce, the fishermen with the morning catch, the olive oil in unlabelled bottles that is better than most of what is exported.

Split rewards the visitor who uses it as a base rather than a destination — who eats peka in Varoš and then takes the ferry to Vis the next morning, who walks the palace walls at 7am before the day visitors arrive from the cruise ships, who watches the sunset from the Marjan Hill forest park above the western edge of the city with the Adriatic islands spread out below. The palace is always there when you return, its Roman columns standing in the evening light exactly as Diocletian left them, surrounded by apartment buildings and coffee bars and the general democratic cheerfulness of a city that has been living inside a monument for sixteen hundred years and long since stopped finding it remarkable.