University Library (permanent exhibition of the Glagolitic script)
Museum of Modern Art Rijeka
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

Following the 'Tourist Route' across the Republic Square (Trg Republike) you exit the Old Town. From its left side the square is dominated by the building of the former Girls' School, a work of the architect G. Zammattio built in 1887 in the Neo-Renaissance style. The building is entered from the north, from Dolac Street. Its larger part is nowadays occupied by the University Library with its permanent Glagolitic Script Exhibition, situated on the first floor. The exhibition presents historical development of the Croatian variant of this script adapted to the old-Slavic language and liturgy. It contains a large number of regional examples from the Kvarner and Istrian regions (where the script was maintained the longest) presented as copies of stone epigraphs, frescoes with Glagolitic script, manuscripts, original prints and other books. The ample holdings of the University Library, which is a legatee of the former library of Jesuit conference and school (1627), include collections such as Fluminensia and Adriatica, some graphic collections, and a collection of rarities with some twenty incunabula. The uppermost floor of the building houses the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (formerly the Modern Art Gallery). In addition to a fine collection of local, regional and national works of art of the 19th and 20th centuries, the museum possesses as well several anthological pieces of Croatian modern art pioneers. The activity of the Museum includes the Biennale of the Young and the International Exhibition of Drawings, and more recently it held well-received retrospectives and the exhibition-publicist project The Architecture and Urbanism of Rijeka in 1845-1945.
Dolac Street itself, a polygon of representative architecture of the historicism, is well worth exploring as well. Its palaces are reminiscent of Robert Whitehead, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the Rijeka of that time and co-founder of the Torpedo factory (“Silurificio Whitehead”) and co-inventor of this weapon. The so-called Venetian Palace (at 7 Dolac Street) was originally his residence. The palaces preserve the memory of Giovanni Ciotta, the City Mayor during whose time, in the late 1800s, Rijeka experienced accelerated urbanization, growing beyond its local boundaries. In sharp contrast to the neostylistic facades of the Dolac, there stands at the far end of the street the protomodernist cube of the former Teatro Fenice, today a cinema, (at no. 13), a construction of avant-garde form unifying the geometrical phase of the Secession with the ideas of the early futurism, built in 1913 as the first reinforced-concrete theatre in Europe. Its originators were T. Träxler, disciple of the famous Wagner school, and E. Celligoi, Rijeka's constructor.