Waterfront promenades are named after old emperors - the Lungomare between the spa town of Opatija and more bustling Rijeka is officially named after Kaiser Franz Josef, the last great Austro-Hungarian Emperor. In these parts, Viennese-style coffeehouses stand next to Yugoslavian-inflected kitsch (one of the most popular waterside cafes in Rijeka is located inside a former bunker) the Italianate waterfronts at Opatija and Rovinj feature Germanic thermal bathhouses. In thrall to the Austro-Hungarian Empire - the most famous Habsburg rulers took the waters (and their mistresses) here - and variously under the influence of neighbouring Italy and the Balkans, Croatia's Kvarner and Istria regions form an uncanny cultural no-man's-land. But here in Kvarner, on Croatia's northern coast, the trappings of tourism - violently green mountainsides, blindingly blue sea - are steeped in an almost melancholic history. The Dalmatian coast - Dubrovnik, Split, the island of Hvar - is wildly, even maddeningly gorgeous. The Croatia most tourists know is a relatively straightforward place: its beauty largely divorced from its history. "I want to bring some of D'Annunzio's energy to the present day." "I'm a cosmopolitan dude," he says, with a wink and a thick accent (earlier, he identified himself as "just your typical local guy"). He shows me photographs of some of his more experimental art pieces on his phone, and details other schemes he has to celebrate Rijeka's literary visitors: D'Annunzio, James Joyce. He orders me another coffee as women with small dogs parade up and down Korzo (Rijeka has inherited a languid, formal coffee culture from its former Austro-Hungarian occupiers). A chance to show the world Rijeka's poetic, rebellious spirit first-hand. A team of actors to 'steal' Tito's ship: a combination of D'Annunzio-era piracy and the metaphorical overthrow of a Soviet-era dictator. "But what if we could stage a pirate attack?" Not a real one, he clarifies, just for fun. One of the 2020 events Ćosić and his team are planning involves transforming the ship into a museum. He explains: in Rijeka's harbour on the Adriatic, among the cargo ships that in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire made the city, along with Italy's Trieste, one of the main Habsburg outposts on the coast, there lies the warship of Josip Broz Tito: the communist dictator who ruled former Yugoslavia, including Croatia, with an iron fist. That, he says, isn't part of Rijeka's historically riotous, anarchic spirit. He's sick of safe Capital of Culture programmes that celebrate anodyne art. Ćosić, the communications director for Rijeka's 2020 Capital of Culture programme, and an experimental artist in his own right, isn't your typical bureaucrat. "Back in the days of the Free State of Fiume" - a period after World War I when Rijeka was occupied by the poet-turned-warlord Gabriele D'Annunzio - "the city made its money on piracy." Back then, Fiume - as it was known - was home to a lost generation of poets, smugglers, philosophers, free love advocates, drug addicts, prostitutes and mystics. "Hear me out," he says, blinking rapidly, as we sit on Korzo, the pedestrianised street that runs beneath smooth Austro-Hungarian facades.
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