St Donatus and the Roman Forum, Zadar

St Donatus is a ninth-century church built as a tall stone cylinder, standing directly on the paving of the Roman forum it was built out of. Look at the base and you can see reused Roman blocks and column drums in the walls, and inside, the upper gallery is carried on shafts taken from temple columns. It has not served as a church for a long time. It is a bare, echoing drum of stone with almost nothing in it, which is why it is used for concerts, the acoustics being the main event. Around it the forum survives as an open field of Roman paving, column bases, carved fragments and one tall pillar still standing.

What you actually see

• The rotunda interior - a bare stone cylinder with an upper gallery carried on reused Roman columns.
• The forum paving - an open Roman square with column bases and carved fragments lying where they fell.
• The standing pillar - a single tall Roman column left upright at the edge of the square.
• St Anastasia's bell tower - the cathedral campanile next door, climbable for a view over the peninsula.

When to go

Spring and autumn are pleasant and the old town is easily walkable; July and August bring heat and cruise groups in the middle of the day. Early evening is the good hour, when the stone goes warm and the summer concert season uses the rotunda. The church closes for events and keeps shorter hours out of season.

Honest expectations

The interior is genuinely empty, and visitors expecting decoration are often puzzled at paying to walk into a stone drum. The forum is an unfenced field of rubble with light interpretation and a lot of pigeons. Zadar's old town takes cruise arrivals badly for a few hours at a time, and the bell tower stairs are steep and hot.

Nearby

The sea organ is at the end of the peninsula, and Nin lies half an hour north.