Greetings from Croatia!

This year has been good for conferences – first CAMWS in Grand Rapids and now the XIIth International Colloquium on Roman Provincial Art in Pula, Croatia.  In retrospect, it’s amazing that I presented a paper in Pula.  I didn’t know about the colloquium until the day before the deadline and begged for another 24 hours to submit an abstract.  By the time I found out it had been accepted (through the program posted on the internet) I had missed the registration deadline.  I never received any information about the conference except for hotel information.  Somehow I made my way from Baton Rouge to Atlanta to New York to Venice, and then to Trieste by train and by bus to Pula, arriving 28 hours after I’d started my journey.  When I showed up with my 26 minute paper, I found out it as supposed to be 20 minutes – but this was an hour before I presented and it was too late to change anything.  It wasn’t until the last day of the conference that I discovered that the email address they had for me was wrong!  But my paper was well-received, and should be published in the Proceedings – a real publication for me!

Headquarters, Italian Community in Pula

In most other respects, the conference was extraordinarily well-organized.  It was held at the Headquarters of the Italian Community in Pula in a state of the art meeting room with simultaneous translation of papers into Croatian, German, English, French and Italian through headsets.  Coffee breaks were held on the expansive terrace and lunch was held in the lapidarium of the Archaeological Museum of Istria, where we stood on Roman mosaics and used tombstones as tables!

New friends at the Archaeological Museum of Istria

Several excursions were arranged, including cocktails at the archaeological site of Nesactium, lit by titi torches, with entertainment provided by a Roman music enthusiast:

We traveled to Brijuni National Park by boat, and visited local museums at Buzet  and Labin.  After the conference, there was an optional excursion to Nin, Zadar , and Split to see Diocletian’s Palace.  An anonymous benefactor made this excursion possible (Thanks, Dad!).  

Pula amphitheater at sunset