Croatia's Nice of the east

They say glamour's back in style. In Opatija, the Nice of the east, it never really went away. On the terrace of Hotel Millennium, a five-star-revived classic, we're drinking Croatian prosecco like it's going out of fashion - shiveringly good, as grey clouds gradually pad the choppy horizon.

Pines and palms throw spiky silhouettes against the sky as the waiter, maroon-clad, sombrely unthunks our second bottle. On the bathing platforms that edge the promenade, almond teenagers saunter and dive. Parasols at jaunty angles stir in early-evening gusts, and with them prostrate dames of Austro-Hungarian expansion, clutching towels, ready for hot chocolates and pastries riddled with confectioner's cream.

Below the Ucka Mountains, mirrored against the Gulf of Kvarner, Opatija wears nostalgia like a fur stole from old Budapest, its Riviera neoclassicism as ornate and crumbly as the cakes once delivered daily by fast trains from Vienna - treats for Isadora Duncan, Gustav Mahler and whoever else sought creative/curative respite in hillside villas high above the sea.

Today the limelight is hogged by Dubrovnik and the Dalmatian islands, way south. But Croatian tourism was born in Opatija, on the Istrian peninsula which daggers into the Adriatic east from Venice. Date of birth: 1844, when Ignia Scarpa, a merchant from nearby Rijeka, commissioned a good-enough-to-eat cream summer house, Villa Angiolina, on a promontory in the tiny fishing town, summoning guests imperial and influential from Austro-Hungary and beyond.

Word spread of Opatija's perennially mild micro-climate - the alchemy of a singular setting, where mountains meet a gulf sheltered by giant islands out at sea. It was just what the doctor ordered for the under-the-weather wealthy, among them the grand duke of Luxembourg, Alfred of Nassau - best known, as local author Amir Muzur tells us in his Itinerary for Researchers and the Inquisitive, for "his everyday strolls to the concert pavilion with a metre-long cigarette which he had made after his physician agreed to allow him to smoke a cigarette a day".

RAILWAY tycoon Friedrich Schuler, spying further lucre, linked Opatija to the Vienna-Trieste line in 1873, adding for dramatic measure the town's first hotel, Kvarner, a vanilla monolith which still commands the waters amid a wig of dense foliage. With Warmbader (hot baths), a cavernous crystal ballroom and "the most elegant caf? in the world", it filled with Romanian royalty and Habsburg princes. Balneologists, pathologists and laryngologists piled down to practise, and a spa was born.

A century would see it dented - by world wars, the end of empires; Communism and the loss of souls in disintegrating Yugoslavia. Yet through it all Opatija survived: a

model-village version of a Mitteleuropa metropolis, cradled in its amphitheatre of evergreen.

A flight from Stansted to Trieste, north-easternmost Italy; a drive over the border, across Istria, past farmhouses flagged with pastel shutters, silver olive groves, fairytale towns piled on distant hills, and we're in Millennium's Restaurant Argonauti, deciphering the menu.

The prosecco has slipped down with the day's end, the nightscape a Felliniesque thrum of neon, bad renditions of La Bamba and Besame Mucho from seafront caf?s. The real dilemma: to order, or not to order, "sea frog in white wine sausage".

The "sausage" riddle solved ("red wine sausage", "rosemary sausage" - work it out), the waiter produces a Croatian compendium which exposes our sci-fi amphibian as angler fish. In white wine sauce? Make mine a squid ink risotto, eased down with Croatian cabernet sauvignon, cheeses and stock, as they call the brandy in these parts.

Day dawns pale and delicate as a blown bubble, crowded with Sistine Chapel clouds. A dip beckons, though sharks trail the discharged blood of trawlers heading back across the blue to Rijeka. Small wonder swimmers bob in shallow shoals, jabbering Italian and urgent German in the swell.

Opatija is being spruced up - hotels Atlantic, Kontinental and Adriatic are earmarked - and Hotel Millennium trumpets such new-worldly Wellness treatments as "tui na energetic Chinese massage with acupressure" and "cold aromatherapy legs wrapping". None of which seduces like a walk on the sepia-tinted side of town.

Hulking Hotel Dubrovnik is battered, boarded-up and imposing still, after years as a dormitory for fugitives from the fighting. Grand Hotel Palace and Hotel Bellevue, neighbourly dowagers, arch eyebrows magnificently at the bubblegum dispensers and Athena artists among the thick crowds on the promenade below.

ONE morning, while we scrutinised the millefeuille facades of Villa Amalia - the annexe for Kvarner's best guests - we saw the garden palms dance just as they did for Isadora Duncan, who would confess her finest moves came from watching them flutter. Then, on the steep path to the Church of the Annunciation, Villa Jeanette slid into view, gazing seawards with the glazed look of Gustav Mahler, who dreamed of saccharine strings while sleeping off surgery there, back in 1901.

A century on, the audience that night at La Traviata, in the openair theatre, so slurped and scoffed you could barely detect Violetta's tragic consumption over theirs. But more edifying eating lay, next day, two miles along the lungomare coastal path, past mansions, cypress and laurel, in Volosko - a cove of restaurants aflap with striped awnings. At Plavi Podrum, over monster crab salads, Daniela, official Best Sommelier in Croatia, took us on a tastebud tour of her country's best cellars, warm and sunny as the past.

On the promenade back to Opatija, the sun suddenly withdrew, turning monochrome the view. Something beautiful but irretrievable, clouds moving darkly, far out to sea.

Way to go

Nick Redman flew to Trieste with Ryanair (08701 569569; www. ryanair.com), daily flights from Stansted, current returns from £39.98. Bond Tours (020 8786 8511) has a fournight stay in Opatija at the Hotel Millennium for £370pp B&B, including return flights.