Spend all your time cocooned in the old town and you’ll miss out on many of Split’s more quirky delights, of which the maritime museum is undoubtedly one. It’s located inside the Gripe fortress, built by the Venetians in the sixteenth century to keep the Ottomans at bay, and subsequently used as a barracks by the Austrian Empire. Contents include a simple but compelling collection of model ships through the ages, ranging from Venetian galleys to twentieth-century cruise liners. Also lying around are all manner of nautical equipment, lighthouse lanterns and naval uniforms. Most striking exhibit is the room devoted to the ground-breaking torpedoes developed by the Whitehead-Lupis workshop in nineteenth-century Rijeka. To finish off, you can look around an outdoor display of beached boats while serenaded by shrieking peacocks – a colony of which roams free on the east side of the fortress.