Laid-back Ljubljana

July 13 -- — Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana (pronounced lyoob-lyonna)—with a lazy old town clustered around a castle-topped mountain—is often compared to Salzburg.

It's an apt comparison, but only if you add some breezy Adriatic culture, throw in a Slavic accent, and sub in local architect Joze Plecnik for Mozart.

Ljubljana feels much smaller than its population of 300,000. Festivals fill the summer, and people enjoy a Sunday stroll any day of the week. Fashion boutiques and cafés jockey for control of the old town, and the leafy riverside promenade crawls with stylishly dressed students sipping kava and polishing their near-perfect English.

Centuries-old Ljubljana first made it on the map when Napoleon dubbed it the capital of his Illyrian Provinces (1809-1813). A half-century later, the railway connecting Vienna to the Adriatic (Trieste) was built through town—and Ljubljana boomed. But soon after, much of the city was destroyed by an 1895 earthquake. It was rebuilt in the Art Nouveau style so popular in Vienna, its capital at the time. A generation later, architect Joze Plecnik bathed the city in his distinctive artsy-but-sensible, classical-meets-modern style.

Ljubljana's biggest attraction is its ambience. The Ljubljanica River, lined with cafés, restaurants, and a buzzing outdoor market, divides the city in half. Most sights are either on or just a short walk from the river, which is crossed by several interesting bridges, the most famous being Plecnik's Triple Bridge.

At the center is lively Preseren Square, with a hulking statue of the Slovene national poet France Preseren presiding. The streets around this square are an architecture-lover's paradise, starting with Hauptmann House, the only building in town that survived the devastating 1895 earthquake. A few years later, the owner renovated it anyway, to match all the buildings reconstructed after the