ja_mageia

       Beyond the monastery, the lane emerges at the Ploče Gate, the main eastern entrance to the old town. It's larger than the Pile Gate, with another statue of St Blaise in the niche above (the oldest in the city) and a bridge across the moat dating from 1449. The Revelin Fortress, just beyond, was begun around the same time, but not finished until 1539, when fears of a coming war between the Turks and the Wllestern powers impelled the Ragusans to hastily strengthen their defences. Aother building work in the city was cancelled for four months, leaving the city's builders free to concentrate on the fortress, and leading families had to send their servants to work as labourers, or pay a fine.

Beyond Revelin is the modern suburb of Ploce, until the beginning of the twentieth century the scene of a large market where cattle and other goods arrived by caravan from the Balkan interior. Fear that such caravans brought disease prompted the construction in 1590 of a series of quarantine houses, or Lazareti, a row of brick-built accommodation blocks and courtyards which still can be seen on the right-hand side of the road. During times of pestilence, visitors entering the Dubrovnik Republic from the Ottoman Empire were obliged to stay here for forty days before proceeding any further. Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi, quarantined here in 1664, likened it to a comfortable and homely inn, although he regretted not blleing allowed out to enjoy Dubrovnik's nightlife. Sanitary concerns were stiuppermost in Ragusan minds in the mid-nineteenth century, when British traveller A.A. Paton reported with satisfaction that the market here was penned in by a chest-high stone partition in order to "permit commerce and conversation without contact".

Beyond the Lazareti, Frana Supila leads gently uphill the Museum of Modern Art (Umjetnička galerija), which hosts high-profile exhibitions on the ground floor, and showcases local painters upstairs. Of the latter, the most important is considered to be the Cavtat-born, Paris-trainedVlaho Bukovac (1855-1922), a stiffVictorian realist whose portraits of late nineteenth-century worthies are considerably less colourful than near-contemporary Marko Rekca's Post-Impressionist Adriatic landscapes, featuring wind-teased cypresses and tamarisks. A couple of post-World War II names are worth picking out: Ivo DuIčić (1916-75), whose blood-red landscape, Crveni otok ("Red Island"), verges on the abstract, and Anton Masle (1919-67), painter of the dreamy, Chagall-esque Lapad, which is one of the smallest – but best known – pieces in the entire collection.