Rijeka's past sits in layers: a Roman command building under the old town, a Jesuit rotunda cathedral, Whitehead's torpedo works, and a river that was a guarded frontier. Three days of sites explaining how Fiume became Rijeka.
Excavated from 2005 beneath the old town, the Principia was the command building of Roman Tarsatica on the 4th-century Liburnian limes. Glass floors reveal barrack walls and the late-antique gate. Open Tue–Sun.
Croatia's only round Baroque cathedral, begun by the Jesuits in 1638 on the model of Venice's Santa Maria della Salute. Inside hangs the 13th-century Gothic crucifix that legend says bled when a gambler stoned it in 1296.
The Augustinians raised Sv. Jeronim in 1408; its Gothic chapel holds tombs of Frankopan-era nobility. The adjoining monastery hall hosted the 1905 Rijeka Resolution, which aligned Croatian and Hungarian politics against Vienna.
Petar Kružić, captain of Klis, paid for these 561 pilgrim steps in 1531 so worshippers could climb from the Rječina up to Trsat. Baroque votive chapels punctuate the ascent; the lower flights are the oldest surviving stretch.
Robert Whitehead and Giovanni Luppis developed the world's first self-propelled torpedo in Rijeka from 1866. The 1930s concrete launch ramp still juts into the sea at Mlaka, the last standing relic of the city's arms industry.
The 1928 Orthodox synagogue is the only one of Rijeka's two to survive; the grand 1903 temple on Pomerio was burned by Italian fascists in January 1944. The small community still opens the building to visitors by arrangement.
A 1938 Italian banana carrier converted into Yugoslavia's floating palace, the Galeb took Tito to Nasser, Nehru and London. Restored in Rijeka's shipyard and opened as a museum ship, with salons and cabins kept as they were.
Fellner and Helmer's 1885 house opened as the Teatro Comunale of Fiume; the young Gustav Klimt painted the ceiling with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch. It stayed Italian-run through the Fiume years, renamed for Zajc in 1953.
Until 1945 Sušak was a separate Yugoslav town facing Italian Fiume across the Rječina, with customs posts on the bridge. Villa Ružić, a 19th-century patrician house above the old frontier, holds the city museum's Sušak interiors.
Laid out in 1873 on terraces above the city, Kozala is among Europe's older park cemeteries. Habsburg shipowners, Hungarian port officials, Italian irredentists and Yugoslav partisans lie within a few hundred metres of one another.
Andrija Ljudevit Adamić opened the mill in the Rječina gorge in 1821; under Smith & Meynier its cigarette paper sold across the Ottoman world. Production stopped in 2005 and the roofless halls now stand in the canyon below Trsat.
The walled hill town 12 km above Rijeka was the seat of the Habsburg Kastav lordship. Inside the ramparts stand the Crekvina, a roofless 17th-century Jesuit church, and the well where captain Morelli was drowned by villagers in 1666.