Cultural sight Battiala-Lazzarini Palace in Labin , Travel Guide for holidays in Labin, Istria

Cultural sight Battiala-Lazzarini Palace, Labin – Points of interests

One of the most beautiful buildings in the old heart of Labin, and also one of the best preserved and most representative Baroque palaces throughout Istria, is surely the Battiala Lazzarini Palace. The building captures the attention with its size and surface area of almost one thousand square meters and the abundantly decorated façade of reddish colour and with blue windows. It was built by the Battiala family, partly during the 17th and partly during the 18th century, and later on it was thoroughly renovated and reconstructed by 1994. The Palace has been nationalized after World War II. A boarding school for pupils was first opened in the Palace and then turned into apartments, and since 1960 the Labin Folk Museum has been located within the building. The museum is adorned by a rich archaeological, ethnographic, cultural and historical collection and a unique replica of a mining horizon which is worth seeing. The first owners of the Palace, the Battiala family, were of Turkish and Albanian descent, and they settled in Labin in 1727. In the 19th century Margherita Battiala married Lodovic Lazzarini and it was that very marriage that marked the beginning of the Labin part of the Battiala Lazzarini family. The Lazzarini family moved to Istria from Tuscany as early as in the 14th century. They were later awarded the title of barons. The last owners of the Palace werethree brothers: Giuseppe, Nicolò and Tommaso. The family coat of arms, which can still be seen within the Palace, contains the symbols of immortality, the phoenix bird and the saying “Moriendo renascitur”.