IT TOOK Rok Vogric seven days to propose marriage to me. Red-faced, gold-bearded and exuberant, Rok—one of the waiters at Pirat restaurant in Piran, a pastel-colored Baroque town of 4,000 on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast—had gotten used to my daily lunchtime order: a warm seafood stew of net-fresh mussels and clams, thick with garlic and wine, known as buzara; and sautéed bietola (chard). If I agreed to marry him, he insisted, he would grow bietola fields in my honor. He knew I was a city girl, he said, unused to village life. “But here in Piran, we are a city in a village.” Over time, this border-town has been Venetian,...