"Three generations of a family on a mission to preserve the traditional grape varieties and the wine culture of Istria and Motovun..." So says the website of the Benvenuti Winery, located about 20 minutes away from where we used to live in Istria. And, if there's one...
Our trip from Istria, all the way down to Andalucia, has been an absolute adventure, revisiting places we've not been to in a long while, and taking in new places we wouldn't necessarily see. Even though we were driving, we decided to cut out the route along the south...
When the San Servolo resort opened again, post lockdown, it was clear they had been keeping themselves very busy. As well as the Steak House and hotel, it looked as if the company had been expanding the site. Our first trip out, when we were allowed to mix and...
When we moved to Istria, we naively thought that our lives would be one long holiday. I mean, that's why people come to Istria in their thousands. To holiday. But we quickly got into a groove of living in Istria permanently, and it became too easy to "live". We still...
Well, it has happened. On the 8th July, we turned the key in the lock for the final time and said goodbye to our much loved, renovated Istrian stonehouse and our lives for the last seven and a half years. When we put the house up for sale in March, after the...
I've been keeping a diary/blog of our journey in our stone house in Istria, since before we moved in, in 2017. We're now so very close, to moving. Yes, after seven years of renovating and creating a beautiful home from the shell of a building, we're hopefully onto our...
If we take the motorway south, to Pula, through the Istrian peninsula, about halfway down, we cross a high road bridge. From this vantage point, nestled amidst the lush countryside, it is possible to catch glimpses of the hauntingly beautiful ruins of Dvigrad -...
Over the past four or five years, we've had mixed success with our three honeysuckle plants. They have been moved around the garden quite a lot, due to some extensive renovation works, and last year, we dug them up out of big wooden planters, where they were supported...
Our Istrian stone house has not an iota of art deco about it. With a very traditional Mediterranean stone house structure, a Scandi inspired interior and a contemporary exterior, there's nothing at all that hints at this popular design style of the 1920s and 1930s....
One of the stranger things we packed into the back of the removal lorry when we came out to Istria, was the large clay, chimney pot which had been removed from the roof of our West Didsbury house, when we were renovating it, because it was redundant. I'm not sure why...