ja_mageia

A northward turn off Puča brings you to the House of Marin Držić at Široka 7 (Dom Marina Drzića), where Croatia's greatest sixteenth-century playwright (see box opposite) is commemorated in an imaginative audiovisual display (with English commentary).This makes a brave, if not entirely successful, stab at evoking Renaissance Dubrovnik, somewhat hampered by a lack of genuine exhibits – there's not much to actually see apart from a few facsimile manuscripts.

Go a little way south from here up Doming to reach the Rupe Ethnographic Museum (Etnografski muzej Rupe), whose dull display of regional crafts isn't half as interesting as the building itself, a former municipal grain store built in 1548 and featuring fifteen huge storage pits - the nape or "holes" after which the building is named - carved out of bare rock. The Dubrovnik Republic was almost wholly reliant on imported grain, and the city imposed food-carrying responsibilities on shipowners as much as twelve months in advance. On arrival, wheat was dried in the upper storeys of the building before being sent down chutes into the storage pits below.