Today is the last day of the vaunted truffle festival in Livade just across the Mirna from Motovun. The festival stretches over many weekends, and so it seems never to end. As I write, strains of the abominable Istrian folk music played full blast at the final concert are wafting all the way up the Motovun hill. How could this atrocious blend of Austrian and Italian music ever take hold anywhere, let alone among a people with an astounding musical tradition, a part of which has recently been put under the auspices of the United Nation’s World Heritage program? Wholesale cultural inferiority of the Croats and Slovenes from these parts wedged deep into an alien and incomprehensible world for more than a millennium is the only possible answer. Lacking in everything, they gobbled up anything that was tossed their way by their erstwhile masters. Even the abominable music.