Budva, the city that chose Saint Mark

𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐚 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐕𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲

𝐁𝐮𝐝𝐮𝐚, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜

Some cities seem to have been born to stand on a frontier. Not a border in the narrow sense of the word, not merely a line drawn on a map, but a living threshold: a place where languages meet, where merchants cast anchor, where armies pass through, where churches change their bells and where, for centuries, the sea has shaped the destiny of humankind more profoundly than the land.

Budva, the ancient Budua, belongs to this rare lineage of cities.

Today, many know it as a tourist destination in Montenegro, enclosed by walls and overlooking a sea bathed in light, its Old Town stones worn smooth by the footsteps of countless visitors. But Budva is far more than a beautiful Adriatic postcard. It is one of the oldest cities on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, with a memory reaching deep into Illyrian, Greek and Roman antiquity. Modern sources trace its urban history back more than 2,500 years, while a mythical tradition even links it to Cadmus and Harmonia—the Phoenician founder of Thebes and his wife—figures suspended between Greek mythology and Adriatic geography.

This origin alone tells us much. Budva did not arise as a city closed in upon itself. It was born—or at least is remembered—as a harbour, a crossroads and a place traversed by different peoples. Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Venetians and Austrians: every age left behind a trace, a word, a wall, a seal or a name.

During the Middle Ages, Budua became caught up in the complex affairs of the Dalmatian and Balkan coasts. It passed through periods of Byzantine influence and came under local lordships and powers connected to Doclea, Zeta, medieval Serbia and other political entities in the region. Around the year 1200, it also became the seat of a Latin Catholic diocese, confirming the city’s religious and institutional importance within the medieval Adriatic world.

The true turning point, however, came when Budua entered Venice’s sphere of influence.

Here, one particular term must be used: dedication.

In Venetian political language, “dedication” was not simply another name for military conquest. It was the act through which a community, city or territory placed itself under the protection of the Republic of Venice, recognising Venetian sovereignty in exchange for protection, privileges, institutional continuity and security. This relationship should not, of course, be idealised: the Serenissima pursued its own strategic, commercial and military interests. Yet, in its legal and symbolic form, dedication was also a pact.

According to reconstructions found in reference works concerning the Venetian administrations of Dalmatia, Budua formally dedicated itself to Venice on 1 August 1422. Some general accounts instead identify 1420 or 1442 as the year in which the city entered permanently into the Venetian sphere. This discrepancy reflects the different stages of Venetian control, local developments and the distinction between formal dedication, the effective consolidation of Venetian rule and the establishment of a fully organised administrative system.

This clarification is important because history is not an immovable inscription carved in stone: it is often a stratification of acts, transitions, confirmations, reversals and settlements.

Budua was not Venice. But it was Venetian. And this distinction is crucial.

It was not Venice because it remained a small frontier city, exposed and peripheral in relation to the lagoon capital. Yet it was Venetian because it became part of the Stato da Mar, the network of ports, islands, fortified towns and maritime outposts that enabled the Serenissima to control trade routes, commerce and naval defence throughout the Adriatic and the Levant. Budua belonged to what was known as Venetian Albania, a term used to describe Venice’s possessions along the south-eastern Adriatic coast, between the Bay of Kotor and the surrounding territories.

Here, stone became politics.

Budva’s walls, gates, citadel and fortifications facing both land and sea were not merely architectural structures: they were the physical expression of a choice rooted in Adriatic civilisation. The Old Town, standing on a small rocky promontory, was enclosed and protected by fortifications that still give its skyline the distinctive appearance of the Venetian walled cities of the Adriatic.

In a region where the Ottoman Empire was advancing and Balkan lordships rapidly shifted their alliances, Venice represented a guarantee of maritime continuity for many coastal communities. The Lion of Saint Mark was not merely a religious or political emblem: it was the symbol of an entire network. Behind that Lion stood ships, magistrates, statutes, markets, archives, customs duties, jurisdictions, rectors, governors and soldiers.

Budua, small yet precious, became one of the vital links in that network.

𝐁𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐕𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐮𝐝𝐮𝐚

To understand Venetian Budua, we must free ourselves from an overly modern idea of “dominion.” Venice did not administer its Stato da Mar as a centralised nation-state. It governed through administrative districts, rectors, governors, captains, local councils, statutes and customary laws. In many Dalmatian cities, the Republic sought to maintain a balance between Venetian authority and local autonomy. Studies of the Stato da Mar emphasise that Venice administered its maritime territories through districts entrusted to rectors sent from the capital.

In Budua, as in other coastal cities, Venetian government therefore meant a military garrison, but also civil administration. Historical accounts mention the presence of a Venetian governor or representative and a town council modelled on institutions belonging to the Venetian tradition.

The Serenissima did not merely bring soldiers here: it brought an administrative language.

The urban centre remained small, but densely inhabited. Within the walls stood churches, houses, warehouses, cisterns and public spaces. Noble and common families lived alongside craftsmen, seafarers, members of the clergy and officials. Beyond the walls began another world: countryside, mountains, villages, less secure overland routes and peoples of different languages and traditions.

Budua therefore existed in a state of constant tension: the sea connected it to Venice, Cattaro, Ragusa, Spalato, Zara and Ancona, while the land exposed it to the Balkan interior and the threat of military attack.

This position explains the city’s importance.

It was not large, but it was essential. It was not immensely wealthy, but it was strategic. It did not rule the Adriatic, but it helped bind it together.

During the sixteenth century, as Ottoman pressure grew increasingly intense, Budua became involved in the great conflicts of the Mediterranean. Sources also mention a brief Ottoman or corsair occupation between 1571 and 1573, within the context of the War of Cyprus and the struggle between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Following the peace settlement of 1573, the city returned to the Venetian sphere.

Let us imagine Budua in those years.

The walls under guard. The sea crossed by suspicious ships. News arriving from Cyprus, Lepanto, Cattaro and Venice. Families sheltering inside their homes during alarms. Clergymen praying in the churches. Venetian officials writing reports. Merchants calculating risks and losses. The inhabitants aware that they lived in a small city, certainly, but one standing at the heart of an immense struggle.

This is what makes Budua’s history so fascinating: the contrast between the city’s modest size and the magnitude of the history passing through it.

Venetian Budua was also a city of Adriatic Italian language and culture. General sources and certain historiographical traditions record that Italian and Venetian-Dalmatian played a significant role in the coastal cities. In the case of Budua, the testimony of Luigi Paulucci is often cited: according to him, at the beginning of the nineteenth century a large part of the population still spoke Venetian. This claim must be treated with caution, since it comes from a nineteenth-century source and refers to a multilingual society. Nevertheless, it is consistent with the cultural landscape of the Venetian cities on the eastern Adriatic.

Names, notarial deeds, inscriptions, administrative formulae, correspondence and family traditions preserved this influence for many years.

Budua was not an anonymous colony. It was a Venetian Adriatic city whose identity was composed of many layers: local, Catholic, Slavic, Latin, Venetian and maritime. The Venetian world did not necessarily erase everything it encountered; it often absorbed, translated and regulated it.

For this reason, the word “Serenissima” should not be understood merely as an expression of nostalgia. For Budua, Venice represented a tangible political horizon for almost four centuries. From 1422/1442 until the fall of the Republic in 1797, the city remained bound to the Lion of Saint Mark.

When the Republic of Venice fell in 1797, overwhelmed by the European crisis and the Napoleonic advance, an extraordinarily long chapter in Budua’s history came to an end.

But cities do not lose their soul in a single day.

After Venice came the Habsburgs, followed by the Napoleonic Wars, then Austria once again and finally the ruptures of the twentieth century. Budva/Budua passed through a succession of new sovereignties: Austrian, briefly French, Austrian once more, then Yugoslav and finally Montenegrin. Historical accounts record its passage to the Habsburgs after 1797, the Napoleonic interlude and its subsequent return to the Austrian Empire until 1918.

Yet the memory of Venice did not disappear.

It remained in the walls. It remained in the stones. It remained within certain families. It remained in the documents.

And it is precisely here that general history encounters human history.

For cities are not made solely of treaties and battles. They are also made of surnames that endure; pharmacies opening every morning; letters sent from Zara; invoices dispatched from Spalato; insurance documents completed in Ancona in the midst of war; and imperial seals impressed upon papers now yellowed with age.

The wider history of Budua inevitably leads us to the families who inhabited it.

Among them, one in particular deserves to have its story told today: the Antonioli family.

𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐕𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐞: 𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲, 𝐅𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐢 𝐅𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲

The fall of the Serenissima in 1797 did not erase the Venetian character of the eastern Adriatic. It transformed it. In Budua, as in many cities of Dalmatia and the Bay of Kotor, the new Austrian authorities encountered an already established society, with families accustomed to administrative writing, cultural mediation, commerce and civic life. The Habsburgs inherited a world that Venice had helped shape and organise over the course of centuries.

It is within this long continuity that the memory of the Antonioli family belongs.

According to Pietro Antonioli, the family arrived in Budua during the seventeenth century. If this family tradition is confirmed by archival documents, it would place the Antoniolis’ arrival at the very heart of the city’s Venetian period, when Budua was still part of the Serenissima’s Stato da Mar and lived beneath the Lion of Saint Mark. Their presence would not, therefore, have begun after Venice: the family would have become part of the local community when Budua was still fully Venetian.

This is a crucial distinction.

A family that arrived in seventeenth-century Budua does not belong solely to the post-Venetian history of Dalmatia. At least in terms of its original settlement, it belongs to the living history of Budua under Saint Mark. It means imagining the Antoniolis within a walled city overlooking the Adriatic, governed by Venetian magistrates and traversed by merchants, clergymen, officials, soldiers, sailors, notaries and families speaking Italian, Venetian, local Slavic languages and the many mixed varieties heard along the coast.

The seventeenth century was a decisive period for the Venetian Adriatic. The Serenissima was still a maritime power, but it had to defend its eastern possessions tenaciously. The cities of Venetian Albania, including Budua, existed in a permanent frontier condition: protected by the sea, exposed on land, linked to Venice but constantly engaged—and at times in conflict—with the Balkan hinterland and Ottoman pressure. In this world, every family rooted in the city became part of a small community of civil resistance: not necessarily armed resistance, but everyday endurance, sustained through work, continuity, faith, language, documents, relationships and memory.

After the end of the Republic of Venice, the Antonioli family did not disappear from the records.

A document issued in Zara in 1829 identifies Leone Antonioli as an “Imperial Royal Praetorial Pupil” in Budua. The language now belongs to the Habsburg administration: “I.R.” means Imperial Royal, while the reference to the praetorial office relates to the sphere of local judicial and administrative affairs. Yet the very fact that an Antonioli appears within the Austrian bureaucratic system in Dalmatia confirms the family’s social and cultural standing within the city.

It is almost a symbolic passing of the torch.

The Lion of Saint Mark no longer flies above Budua; the imperial eagle has taken its place. Nevertheless, the names, the language of official documents, civic customs and administrative culture remain profoundly marked by the Venetian legacy. The Austrian Empire did not encounter a land devoid of memory: it found a city that had lived for centuries within the political, legal and maritime order of the Serenissima.

Then came the twentieth century—and with it, rupture.

Wars, nationalism, shifting borders, the collapse of empires and the tragedies of the eastern Adriatic struck the Italian-Dalmatian world severely. Many Italian families disappeared from the Dalmatian cities in which they had lived for generations. Some departed, some assimilated, some dispersed, while others remained as the last custodians of an increasingly fragile memory.

The Antoniolis remained connected to Budva through a profession with an almost symbolic significance: pharmacy.

The Apoteka porodice Antonioli—the Antonioli family pharmacy—was the subject of an exhibition organised by the Museum of the City of Budva in 2024: Budvanska riznica zdravlja – Apoteka porodice Antonioli, or “Budva’s Treasury of Health: The Antonioli Family Pharmacy.” This public recognition is extremely important because it places the story of the Antoniolis not only within the family’s private memory, but also within the city’s historical heritage.

In a small Adriatic city, a pharmacy was not merely a commercial establishment. It was a trusted institution. It was a place where fevers were treated, remedies prepared, substances weighed and tinctures, powders, ointments, registers and prescriptions preserved. It was a laboratory, a shop, an archive, a meeting place and, in many cases, a vital civic institution.

The Antonioli pharmacy thus became a bridge between different eras.

A bridge between Venetian Budua and modern Budva.
Between the seventeenth century of family tradition and the twentieth century of commercial invoices.
Between the Italian of the documents and the Montenegrin of museum invitations.
Between private memory and public recognition.
Between the history of healthcare and the history of identity.

Twentieth-century documents confirm this continuity.

An invoice issued in Spalato in 1943, bearing the name “S. Varda – Medicinal Products Depot,” was addressed to the Antonioli pharmacy in Budua/Budva. It lists medicines, chemical preparations, tinctures, bicarbonate, acetylsalicylic acid, animal charcoal and galenic products. It is a fragment of everyday life during the Second World War, but also tangible evidence of the existence of an Adriatic pharmaceutical network connecting Spalato, Budua and other coastal centres.

Another document, dated Ancona, 4 November 1942, concerns the insurance of eight crates of medicines, with an explicit reference to “war risk.” It names the company Fiume S.A. di Assicurazioni e Riassicurazioni and mentions transport by railway or lorry. Here, history becomes almost cinematic: crates of medicines crossing an Adriatic at war, insurance companies calculating the risks, and pharmacies striving to continue providing their services while Europe burned.

But there is no need to invent anything. We need only read the documents.

Ancona. Fiume. Spalato. Budua.

Four names forming a geography of the Italian, Dalmatian and Venetian Adriatic that remained very much alive well into the twentieth century.

And then there is the name: Antonioli.

If the tradition related by Pietro Antonioli concerning the family’s arrival during the seventeenth century is confirmed, the Antoniolis will not merely be an Italian-Dalmatian family that survived the end of Venetian rule. They will be a family whose history in Budua began while the city was still Venetian. Their presence would have endured through the Serenissima, Austrian rule, the twentieth century and contemporary Budva, preserving a rare, almost miraculous continuity.

For this reason, when we speak of the Venetians of Budva and the last descendants of that world, the Antonioli family will assume a significance extending far beyond private genealogy. It will become a gateway to a much greater history: that of the Venetian and Italian-Dalmatian families who remained on the eastern Adriatic coast after the end of the Republic, after Austrian rule, after the wars, after the exodus and after the silence.

Budva deserves to be portrayed not merely as a tourist destination, but as a city of memory.

Its walls are not simply beautiful. They are documents carved in stone.

Its streets are not merely picturesque. They are pathways through civilisation.

Its Italian names are not simply romantic remnants. They are traces of a real history, shaped by institutions, acts of dedication, families, commerce, pharmacies, archives, loyalties and survival.

In forthcoming articles and podcasts, we will explore this story in greater depth: the Venetians of Budva, the city’s centuries-long loyalty to the Serenissima, its Italian-Dalmatian families, the surviving documents, and the voices that endured alongside those that disappeared.

At the heart of this journey will stand the last remaining family to preserve, through its name and memories, a living fragment of Venetian Budua: the Antonioli family.