This week’s dream: ruins of Pula, Croatia

James Joyce hated Pula. The Croatian city was the main naval base of the Austro-Hungarian empire when he was exiled to it in 1904 by his employer, the Berlitz language school - a "naval Siberia", he called it.

The phrase sounds quaint today, says Lucy Hughes-Hallett in Condé Nast Traveller. Pula has long since escaped the icy grip of its Hapsburg overlords to become a vibrant, bustling modern port. In its charming old quarter, their grand old townhouses jostle with the remnants of other fallen empires - Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and all are treated with the same "refreshing" irreverence by the locals.

Pula's Roman forum is still its main square. At night, townspeople congregate in the bars and cafés around it, and teenagers loll on the steps of the first-century Temple of Augustus, "its narrow Corinthian portico is a beautiful, silent shock amid the hurly burly".

The Cvajner café nearby is a medieval hall, covered with Gothic frescos, where "sleek young people sit on kilim-covered sofas" drinking beer. The city's vast Roman amphitheatre is a rock-music venue; its star-shaped Venetian fort an open-air cinema. And towering above it all are the "immense cranes" on the docks.

The city lies on the idyllic coast of the Istrian peninsula, at the northern end of the Adriatic. Nearby is Rovinj, a "lovely Italianate hill town rising from the sea", its harbour full of yachts and fishing boats and surrounded by cafés and restaurants. And the "absurdly picturesque" island of Veli Brijun lies just across the water, the site of the vast Hapsburg pleasure gardens which Marshall Tito preserved as a summer playground for himself and his most glamorous guests.

Roman and Byzantine ruins lie among its woods, near deserted bathing spots where you can bask on dazzling white rocks beside a sparkling sea. Croatia Airlines (020-8563 0022; croatiaairlines.com) flies direct from Gatwick to Pula twice a week. ·