Piran

Tartini Square is the centre of everything: a wide oval of pale marble ringed by pastel buildings, once the inner harbour and filled in when it became a sanitation problem, now the town's living room. A Venetian Gothic house on one corner and the town hall face each other across it, and it is where the town eats, meets and holds everything it holds. From the square, lanes climb the slope to the cathedral of St George on its terrace, and the free-standing bell tower beside it can be climbed — a steep wooden internal staircase with open sides that is not for anyone uneasy about heights, and unquestionably the best view on the Slovenian coast at the top. Higher still, a section of the medieval town wall survives with towers you can walk along, and the view from there takes in the whole peninsula, the salt pans and Croatia beyond. Between these fixed points the pleasure is simply the street plan: narrow, shaded, occasionally passing under buildings, and preserved in its medieval form precisely because the peninsula was closed to traffic rather than widened for it. The transport guide covers where you actually leave the car and how the shuttle works, which is the practical half of the same decision.