Slovenia has exactly 47 kilometers of coastline – about the distance a good cyclist covers before lunch – and Koper is the keeper of its commercial heart. For nearly five hundred years (late 1200s until Napoleon dismantled Venice in 1797), this town was called Capodistria and wore Venetian colors. The Praetorian Palace still stands in Tito Square like a watchful Gothic-Venetian sentinel, its battlements and arched windows reminding you who really built this place. The mayor once ruled from that palace, dispatching orders under the Lion of St. Mark while the Adriatic lapped at the city walls.

We walked straight off the ship into Tito Square, where the contrast between 15th-century Venetian stone and Yugoslav-era concrete feels less like contradiction and more like conversation. The bell tower climb rewards you with views over terracotta roofs toward Trieste on one side and Slovenian hills rolling green on the other. Coffee on Čevljarska street tastes like Vienna but costs half the price – this is the beautiful contradiction of being Slovenia's biggest coastal town in a country with barely any coast at all.

We rented bikes and took the Parenzana trail – a repurposed narrow-gauge railway that once connected Trieste to Poreč. The path threads through old tunnels and over stone viaducts into the heart of the Istrian Peninsula, where the air smells like olive groves and the earth hides white truffles worth their weight in gold. We stopped at a tiny konoba for lunch: fuži pasta with fresh truffles shaved tableside until we literally begged them to stop. This is truffle country, olive oil country, wine country – the Italy you remember from dreams, except it's Slovenia and half the tourists haven't figured it out yet.