The Korzo

About this place

Rijeka''s main street and central promenade, and the city''s social axis more than a monument. The name is Italian (**corso**), meaning a promenade, and is a survival from the century in which the city spoke Italian. There are no cars on it. Its position has meaning: this was the line of the **southern city wall** until the nineteenth century, and the sea came right up to it. The wall was demolished and the shore filled in to enlarge the port, so the street that had been the city''s edge became its heart. Along both sides are facades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Austrian and Hungarian in style, some of it good **Art Nouveau** — with cafés that put chairs out almost all year. At its middle stands the **City Tower**: a baroque gate with a clock and a double-headed Habsburg eagle, and beneath it the passage into **Stari Grad**, the small medieval core. Note: Rijeka has a social custom also called **«the korzo»**: the evening walk up and down this street specifically — an inherited habit still very much alive, best seen between six and eight in the evening.