Sebenico

“No suspicion of a town has yet been revealed to the eye when the grim walls and ugly throats of the guns of Fort San Niccolo threaten to dispute the rocky defile into which our steamer enters - a passage so narrow that one can throw a stone across. When the big ship has carefully wriggled through, a broad harbor opens out with Sebenico piling in an amphitheatre at its far extremity. All the landscape is desolate, devoid of verdure, rocky, sun-baked, scourged by the fierce north wind, the bora, and the houses of the city and the great walls of the Spanish castles and the hill-sides and the stony valleys all are tinged with the same ashen hue.

The city, rising from the water’s edge like Genoa, piles house on house high up the hill, punctuated here and there by a spire or a dome. […]. The winding streets and high-staired alleys afford many a picturesque vista, but the town lacks distinctive features, and the hotel is far from good, as we can testify from painful experience” (pp. 75-76).