House of Batana in Rovinj: fishing life in images and sound

Updated November 7, 2026.

The House of Batana in Rovinj is a small museum about a traditional wooden boat. Audiovisual displays link boatbuilding with fishermen’s work and language.

The batana is a flat-bottomed wooden fishing boat, four to six metres long. Rovinj families passed down the skills needed to build it, but industrially made boats gradually displaced it. An association founded in 2004 began safeguarding the boat and the knowledge connected with it. The House of Batana is the exhibition centre of this wider ecomuseum.

A journey by batana

The central installation follows Rovinj fishermen through their working days and nights in the early decades of the 20th century. Projections on the floor, ceiling and front wall show fishing, navigation by the stars and life aboard the boat.

The exhibition covers about one hundred square metres across three gallery spaces. Objects and displays explain how batanas were built and repaired, how nets were made and how people fished. Residents donated the exhibits. The museum occupies a late-17th-century house once inhabited by fishing, seafaring and artisan families.

The community’s language and song

You can listen to conversations in the Rovinj dialect and to bitinada singing. In this vocal tradition, a group imitates instruments with their voices while accompanying a soloist. Alongside the boat, the museum preserves expressions, sounds and skills from everyday life on the waterfront.

The House of Batana belongs to an ecomuseum whose work also includes building and restoring boats, workshops and regattas. In 2016, UNESCO selected the local community’s programme for safeguarding and passing on this knowledge for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.

Visiting the permanent exhibition

The House of Batana stands on the waterfront in Rovinj’s old town. A museum visit covers the permanent exhibition. Batana boat trips and evenings at Spàcio Matika have separate programmes and conditions.

Admission to the permanent exhibition costs:

• €5 for adults
• €4 for school pupils, students and pensioners
• €3 per person for adult groups of ten or more
• €2.50 per person for school groups of ten or more pupils.

Rovinj residents and members of the House of Batana association, ICOM and the Croatian Museum Association enter free of charge. Guided visits in Croatian, Italian and English are available by prior arrangement for groups of up to about twenty people.

Address: Obala Pina Budicina 2, 52210 Rovinj

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