The truffle hunt is not a performance. It is an early morning, a cold field, a dog with its nose in the earth, and the quiet understanding that what you are about to eat took decades of accumulated knowledge to find.
Istria produces some of the world's finest truffles — white in autumn, black through winter and into spring. The Motovun forest, stretching along the banks of the Mirna river, is among the most celebrated grounds. Families who have hunted here for generations do not speak about their spots. The knowledge is inherited, not shared.
You do not find a truffle. You are taken to one, by a dog who understands the forest better than anyone standing upright.
The experience Adrion curates here is built around access. Not a tourist demonstration on the edge of a car park, but a genuine early-morning hunt with a family who has been working this ground for three generations. The walk is quiet. The dog — usually a Lagotto Romagnolo, the breed purpose-built for this work — moves with a focused intensity that makes conversation feel intrusive.
After the hunt
What follows the hunt matters as much as the hunt itself. We arrange a private tasting at a family estate — fuži pasta, hand-rolled, with a shaving of fresh truffle that renders the dish into something else entirely. Local wine. A table by an open fire. The kind of hospitality that is not performed for guests but simply extended, as it would be to a neighbour.
The village above the valley
Motovun itself sits on a hill above the forest, its medieval walls enclosing a village of fewer than a thousand inhabitants. In peak summer it is visited; in November it is almost yours. The views from the ramparts — across the Mirna valley, the vineyards, the pale Istrian sky — are the kind that make the act of looking feel like an achievement.
We include Motovun as part of a longer Istrian itinerary, typically a three-day curated arc that moves between coast and interior, between the Roman amphitheatre at Pula and the hilltop villages of the interior. The truffle morning is its centre of gravity.
