Istrian Truffle Days

Held across a series of weekends from September through November in the Istrian village of Livade, Istrian Truffle Days celebrates one of the region's most prized culinary treasures, drawing food lovers from across the globe to a corner of Croatia that has quietly become one of Europe's great truffle destinations. The festival was started in the late 1990s by the Zigante family, whose patriarch Giancarlo Zigante found a white truffle weighing 1.31 kilograms in the nearby Motovun Forest in 1999 — still recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest truffle ever found.

Under large white tents, visitors can taste both white and black truffles alongside other Istrian specialities — cheese, honey, prosciutto and the region's celebrated olive oil, said by locals to rival Tuscany's. Guided truffle hunts let visitors follow specially trained dogs into the forest in search of the fungus themselves, while truffle auctions and cooking workshops round out a programme that has grown to include more than 50 exhibitors across the festival's various weekends.

For a region whose truffle industry has grown from a modest local trade into a genuine culinary tourism draw, Livade's festival offers the most direct way to understand why: real truffles, real hunters and dogs, and a landscape genuinely suited to producing this notoriously elusive delicacy.