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Few cities in Europe wear their Roman past quite so literally. Split grew around a palace rather than the other way around: the retirement complex that the Emperor Diocletian completed around 305 AD became, over the following centuries, a city in its own right, its corridors and courtyards colonised by medieval families who simply moved into the imperial stonework. That layering of eras, Roman foundations beneath Venetian Gothic windows beneath laundry lines and cafe tables, is what gives Split its particular texture. It is a working city, Croatia's second largest, with a ferry port that connects the Dalmatian coast to the islands, and a population that has lived inside a UNESCO World Heritage Site long enough to treat it as entirely ordinary.

Diocletian's Palace is the obvious starting point for any visit, though the word palace undersells what it actually is. The complex covers roughly half of Split's old town and contains a cathedral, a baptistery, a peristyle square used for open-air concerts, and a network of underground cellars that have survived largely intact. Those cellars appear in the catalogue here as the setting for a wine tasting, which is a reasonable way to understand both the archaeology and the regional viticulture in a single sitting. Dalmatian wines, particularly the reds made from Plavac Mali grown on the Peljesac peninsula, are worth taking seriously, and tasting them beneath two-thousand-year-old vaulting adds a dimension that a conventional wine bar cannot replicate. The palace's association with the television production of Game of Thrones has also generated its own strand of guided visits, drawing on the cellars and surrounding streets as filming locations.