Macarsca

“After another trip through the polders and marshes, which added nothing to my previous stock of knowledge, I embarked in a large stout boat for Macarsca, a town on the mainland, midway between the Narenta and Spalato, in company with an eel speculator returning to Sebenico. […]. As night came on, rain soon began to fall, and scirocco; and my patience was well worn out, when, doubling the last point, I saw the lights of Macarsca gleaming through the windows, and soon landed on the beach. My friends knowing that there was no proper inn at the place, I had a letter to Signor I., a Dalmatian man of letters, and I entered his house (pp. 221-223).

Who ever heard of Macarsca? I confess I never did before coming to Dalmatia, and a prettier situation can scarce be imagined. The town lies in the fashion of a crescent facing the sea. A marine parade, having the regularity of an English sea-bathing place, but without the monotony of one house resembling another, like Birmingham buttons out of the same mould. All the houses are of the cream-coloured freestone, many of them polished smooth, and several with elaborately cut balconies, having quite a town air. Macarsca had been up to 1814 a place of considerable wealth and trade, in consequence of the caravans that came down from Turkey; but the great plague of that year, and the subsequent interruption of the caravans, had place to return to a mere agricultural and fishing subsistence. Behind the town are pretty enclosed gardens, sloping gently upwards, with here and there a plot of grass, on which may be seen a white goat with tinkling bells. Behind the gardens is an extensive wood of olives, as thick as such a wood can grow in the steep concave slopes of the basin that half encircles the bay, beyond which the rocks rise up quite perpendicularly, until the brow of their crests shews a pure white mass of thick snow: but Macarsca pays for its picturesque position in summer, by the intensest heat on the coast (pp. 225-226)”.