COULD Dubrovnik be the new St Tropez? “Does it matter,” said my girlfriend when I told her we were going to Croatia, “as long as all the men look like Goran Ivanisevic?” After a long weekend of selfless, painstaking research, I can report that they don’t all look like the handsome tennis ace, but some do, and most are friendly, with impeccable manners. And according to my partner, the girls are equally gorgeous, with supermodel legs and cheekbones which could slice prosciutto.

I’d posed my jokey St Tropez question after hearing reports of an increasing number of celebrities visiting Croatia — and a slew of shiny new hotels opening to cater for them.

Rumour has it that both Clint Eastwood and Sharon Stone are trying to buy one of the 1,000 or so sun-baked and mainly uninhabited islands off the narrow Croatian coast. Ivana Trump is a sailing party regular and Bill Gates is said to have booked a £13,000-a-week villa last summer on the island of Hvar, famed for its lavender fields.

The islands are rightly popular, but miss out Dubrovnik and you miss a rare gem of a tourist town. Looks aren’t everything, but Dubrovnik has always deserved its old title as the “jewel of the Adriatic”. And today, after a decade of postwar restoration, it sparkles with a refreshing unselfconsciousness that’s completely lacking among the tired old fleshpots of southern France.

As well as beautiful people it has too-blue-to-be-true sea, so unpolluted that you can take a dip straight from the city walls. It’s also less costly than St Tropez, although not cheap: a coffee typically costs just over £1, a beer less than £2 — and it’s much cleaner (when will the French tackle their dog poo problem?).

The first thing we saw when we arrived was a woman on her hands and knees outside the fashionable Carpe Diem Café scraping the chewing gum off the pavement with a knife. It could have been in honour of the Pope’s visit the next day, but litter never lingers here and droppings from hundreds of pigeons miraculously disappear overnight.

In a country where more than 90 per cent of the people are Catholic, the Pontiff has superstar status and it could have been a mistake to clash with his recent visit. The famous city walls, plus all shops, restaurants and bars in the Old Town, closed for the day, making for a unique experience — a tourist hot-spot where no one wanted to sell us anything.

We were trapped in a sealed-off city, closed to everything except the Popemobile and the police. The only way to escape was by boat, 50 minutes down the coast to the sleepy resort of Cavtat. It turned out to be an unexpected joy of a day, fuelled by a lazy lunch with several Ozujsko beers at one of the seafront cafés.

We idled away time, contrasting the mooring skills — some snappy, some slapdash — of visiting yachties. After a cooling dip and a scenic stroll under scented pines, we arrived back in Dubrovnik to see the Papal cordons removed and café tables re-erected in the marble-paved Placa, the Old Town’s main artery.

Since our last visit 15 years ago to what was then Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik had been caught in the crossfire of the civil war. Between 1991 and 1992, 2,000 shells pummelled the Old Town, striking 68 per cent of the 824 buildings, leaving holes in two out of three tiled roofs. There were

314 direct hits on the streets, squares and buildings and 111 on the great wall.

As we lingered in the main square, watching the evening light turn the bleached stone to gold, it was as if nothing had changed. We were surrounded by the same elegant Venetian houses, Baroque bell towers, fountains and steep-cobbled streets. Thanks to a restoration plan masterminded by Unesco, the city has been tenderly reconstructed, and from this vantage point we couldn’t see the join. The complete lack of vehicles, strictly enforced after 10am, hands the city to the people.

Toddlers hurl around, chasing pigeons and visiting restaurant tables, street musicians become wandering minstrels and lovers can whisper without the drone of pesky mopeds, the curse of summer throughout the Mediterranean.