Grisignana - Groznjan
Highlights
- Artists town
- Lovely views
- Venetian influenced
Driving down the ancient Via Flavia road, you will notice a 228-metre high cone-shaped hill on the left. At the top of the hill, among the houses, you can see a church tower. This is Grisignana-Groznjan, the ancient Graeciniana. From the terraced hill, covered with old vineyards and olive gardens, you can enjoy a view of about 20 surrounding villages. This is one of the most beautiful and most fertile areas in Quatro Terre.
The fort of Grisignana was first mentioned in 1102, when marquis Ulrich II and his wife Adelaide donated their property to a patriarch of Aquileia. In this document the burg was called Castrum Grisiniana.
The town, once known as kastel (castle), was surrounded by thick walls, the remains of which are now a valuable historic heritage. It had two gates, and the one still existing, called the Great Gate, used to have a drawbridge. It is situated in a beautiful place where a road from Ponte Porton ends. From a magnificent lookout on the wall, where once the smaller gate used to be and where a Venetian column still stands, one can see far to the horizon. The houses are built tightly next to each other, in the typical medieval style.
Grisignana, a small Quatro Terre town but of great cultural significance (not only in Istria but also internationally), lives its summer months very intensely. Every year at the beginning of May, the little streets and squares of Grisignana metamorphose and turn into a truly artistic beehive: it opens its summer music academies for young people, its artistic, dance and drama workshops and its peace activism workshops under the leadership of well-known experts and teachers and famous names from music, art and drama.
Grisignana became the town of artists in 1956. That is when they started to populate empty houses which the residents were forced to abandon and thus made sure the town did not perish.
During those few summer months Grisignana lives and breathes art and the labyrinth of its little streets become one great stage on which are constantly interchanging the sounds of jazz and classical music, guitar and piano, violin and cello, drum and vibraphone...
