One thing that I’ll always regret is not being able to see the Adriatic 500 years ago, or even 100 years ago. Until I get my time machine perfected (it’s in pieces in my garage at the moment), the best way to do the time warp again, back to the Adriatic of the past, is by reading old guidebooks to the area. There are a handful of them out there, in a variety of languages. I’ll periodically share some of the highlights from these long-dead travelers’ tales.
You could scarcely imagine a more erudite guide to the eastern Adriatic than F. Hamilton Jackson, who in 1908 published his account of two trips to Croatia. Jackson is listed on the frontispiece of his book as “Vice-President of the Institute of Decorative Designers, Cantor Lecturer, Etc.” He was an impressively knowledgeable art historian, and his guidebook is most useful as a very sophisticated survey of some of the Croatian coast’s artistic and architectural riches, from Roman ruins to Renaissance reliquaries.
He digs into seemingly every last cathedral treasure, delivering his pronouncements on the artistic worth of column capitals, Titian paintings, tympanum carvings, and altarpieces featuring saints’ withered arms and heads. He inventories the floorplans of obscure churches and Roman sites, reporting their dimensions and even the fragmentary Latin inscriptions.
Jackson was also an accomplished artist himself. Many of his sketches of the treasures and places he surveyed are reproduced in the book. They often offer a glimpse at the way a town square or harbor used to look, a hundred some years ago, before being dragged into the 21st century. He includes photographs as well, many of which unfortunately haven’t turned out well in the electronic scan version of the book.
If this sounds boring, well, it might be if you’re not interested in art history. But Jackson also turns his eye to the towns and people he visits. He unfailingly and very valuably describes the local costumes of all the different villagers he encounters–and that’s really a window into the past, to the variety of everyday peasant wear that has long since disappeared. The men of Rovigno (today’s Rovinj), for example, wear “ornamented leather shoes, tight hose of wool, a broad-sleeved white shirt with a frill in front, dark waistcoat, and flat black cap. They have the curious custom of wearing one large earring in the left ear.” These days, Rovinj’s men look just about the same as guys anywhere in Europe.
He also touches on other forms of local culture here and there. He recounts in some detail the method for averting a blood feud–it involves a murderer and his whole famiy asking pardon from the murdered man’s family, offering unborn children as peacemakers, doing the “dance of blood,” and coughing up some silver pieces as well. Best, perhaps, to stay well clear of any blood feuds while you’re in Croatia. Remember, instead, a Dalmatian proverb Jackson cites: “He who sings thinks not of evil.”
Jackson also waxes poetic on occasion, his uppercrust British reserve melting under the power of those magical Adriatic sunsets. Who can’t get carried away by the beauty of this part of the world? Reading his book is like taking a travel course with a very dry, proper, Oxbridge expert where Croatian sun ‘n fun takes a backseat to scholarship. And that’s not such a bad thing.
Jackson’s book is available on Google Books.
