Piran

A town on the Gulf of Piran with medieval architecture packed into narrow streets, bilingual in Slovene and Italian, and one of the three major towns of Slovenian Istria. Illyrian Histri lived on these hills before the Roman Empire, farmers, hunters and fishermen, and also pirates who disrupted Roman trade in the northern Adriatic. Rome took the peninsula in 178 and 177 BC. As the empire declined and the Avars and Slavs came, people withdrew onto defensible peninsulas like this one, and by the seventh century, under Byzantine rule, Piran was heavily fortified.