We are familiar with the rather sad fate of Dubrovnik’s renaissance summer residences. The efforts regarding their valorisation and interpretation invested by several generations of art historians offered little concrete results. The residences themselves, as well as their larger context, were devastated by the de-urbanization processes that showed Croatian contemporary society’s impotence and lack of interest with regards to preservation of some of the pinnacles of their cultural heritage. The general public is less familiar with the fact that the territory of the Republic of Ragusa is covered with a network of Franciscan monasteries that functioned as well-rounded eco-social systems, and whose public importance perhaps surpassed that of summer residences. Friar Anđelko Badurina, first in his doctoral dissertation, and then in the book The Role of Franciscan Monasteries in the Urbanization of Dubrovnik Region from 1990, meticulously described the pioneer role of the Franciscan monasteries network, which played an avant-garde role in spreading the influence of the Republic of Ragusa and the renaissance civilization. If summer residences were the scenes of humanism’s high culture, Franciscan monasteries participated in the lives of all social strata. Today, some of these monasteries share the fate of summer residences – they are abandoned, in ruinous state, and there is a general lack of ideas on what to do with them. The level of negligence or the lack of desire to learn something from the historical experience is such that the urban heritage of the Republic of Ragusa should no longer be brought into connection with contemporary Croatia. The burden of history seems too great, the ambitions and values of the Renaissance differ so much from the current moment that they stopped overlapping altogether. Milan Prelog warned us of the heritage without its heir, so perhaps we should no longer insist on historical continuity. Perhaps this heritage should be inhabited by some other culture.