The Ancient Boskarin Ox

The mantle of the adults is milk white; only the mantle of the younger ones is dark. Majestic lyre-shaped horns, topped with brass balls, remind us of its mythological progenitor - the Minotaur. The large neck and powerful shoulders, slow, majestic gait and imposing heft (a young animal easily reaches one ton), make the Istrian ox a monument of nature. Until some years ago it was possible to see oxen slowly moving through the fields in the Istrian interior along the Mirna River Valley or the outskirts of Pula toward Pazin...

The Ancient Boskarin Ox, Giusto de Mar 04-2003 (PDF 739 kb)

Those Two Railway Men Discovered Gold

What were those two crazy Italians with setters doing in their fields? The peasants living in the Mirna River Valley between Oprtalj and Livade were looking at them with curiosity, until they realized they were looking for the smelly potatoes! That’s what the locals called these strange tubers that from time to time popped out from the blows of a hoe: smelly potatoes, food for the poor. But the two crazy Italian railroad workers knew very well that they had discovered Istrian gold: the tuber magnatum pico or white truffle. This was in the early 1930s in Livade, where a narrow gauge railway station connected Poreč to Trieste...

Those Two Railway Men Discovered Gold, Livio Missio 03-2003 (PDF 610 kb)