Split Walking Tour: A Self-Guided Route Through Diocletian's Palace

Split is a city that lives inside a Roman palace. Seventeen centuries ago a retired emperor built himself a vast stone retirement home by the Adriatic, and instead of crumbling into a ruin, it filled up with people, shops, homes, and churches, and never emptied out again. This self-guided Split walking tour takes you through that living palace and out to the green hill that shelters it, and it is one of the more remarkable self-guided walking tours you can do, since the ancient walls here are not a museum you look at but streets you walk down. It is a short loop, under three kilometers, but it packs in a Roman cellar, an emperor's mausoleum, a bustling square, and a viewpoint over the whole red-roofed old town and the islands beyond. Wear comfortable shoes for the marble and the climb, and give it a slow half day.

Before you set off

Set aside three or four hours, more if you climb the bell tower or the hill at the end or stop for a long seafood lunch, which by the water you should. The old town of Split is tiny and dense, a warren of marble lanes polished smooth by centuries of feet, so wear shoes with a bit of grip and expect to get pleasantly lost, since the palace is a maze and that is part of the fun. Summers here are hot and the stone holds the heat, so start early, carry water, and use the shade of the narrow lanes. Almost everything on this route is packed into a few hundred meters, until the final stretch out to the hill, so you can wander freely and always find your way back to the seafront to reorient. The one longer leg is the walk up to Marjan at the end, a gentle climb that earns its view. And do stop as you go for a coffee on the Riva or a snack in a hidden courtyard, because Split is a city that takes its leisure seriously.

The Riva

Start on the Riva, the wide, palm-lined promenade that runs along the seafront in front of the palace, the living room of the whole city. This is where Split comes to stroll, meet, and drink coffee, a broad marble esplanade of cafe terraces facing the harbor, with the old palace wall rising directly behind it and the boats and islands out in front. Take a seat for a few minutes, order a coffee, and watch the town go by, because the slow seafront stroll is a genuine local ritual, especially in the golden hour before dinner. The southern wall of Diocletian's Palace looms right behind the cafes, and hidden in it is a small doorway, the old sea gate, that leads straight into the heart of the ancient complex. Once, before the land in front was reclaimed, the sea came right up to this wall and boats could sail in through that gate. Get a feel for the scale of the palace front from out here, the long line of Roman stone with the modern cafe life bustling at its foot, then step through the Bronze Gate in the middle of the wall and into the cool shadows of the palace cellars.

Diocletian's Palace Substructures

Through the sea gate you enter the substructures of the palace, the podrumi, a vast complex of vaulted stone cellars that once formed the foundations of the emperor's private apartments above. For centuries these halls were filled with rubbish and forgotten, which is exactly why they survived so intact, and clearing them out revealed a near-perfect map in stone of the grand imperial rooms that once stood overhead. Walking through the cool, dim, echoing chambers is like stepping straight back into the fourth century, the bare Roman stonework rising into shadowy arches above you. Part of the complex is free to pass through, the central corridor that links the seafront to the square above, usually lined with market stalls selling crafts and souvenirs, and a larger ticketed section opens off it if you want to explore the full extent of the cellars. Fans of a certain television show about dragons may recognize these halls, which have stood in for more than one throne room. Take a slow walk through the vaults, feel the temperature drop and the centuries fall away, then climb the stairs at the far end, which lift you up into the bright ceremonial center of the palace.

Peristyle, Cathedral and Jupiter's Temple

You emerge into the Peristyle, the monumental colonnaded courtyard at the very center of the palace, and it is the showpiece of the whole old town. This was the emperor's ceremonial square, ringed by columns and arches of imported stone, where subjects would gather to greet Diocletian as a living god descending the steps from his apartments. Today its steps are an open-air stage where people sit with a drink and listen to a singer in the evenings, the same stones serving as a theater seventeen centuries on. On one side rises the Cathedral of Saint Domnius, which began life as Diocletian's own mausoleum, a strange twist since the emperor was a famous persecutor of Christians, and the very tomb built for him became a church dedicated to one of his victims. Its slender medieval bell tower is the symbol of Split, and if you have the legs, the steep climb up its open stairways gives a wonderful view over the rooftops. Directly opposite, down a tiny lane, stands the little Temple of Jupiter, remarkably intact, once dedicated to the king of the gods and later turned into a baptistery, guarded now by a headless black sphinx carried here from Egypt long ago. Linger in this dense knot of monuments, the beating heart of the palace, then head north up the main street toward the old landward gate.