Sette Castelli

"One morning I started, after a good breakfast at the café, at 5.30, on my way to Traù. The drive takes just three hours, along a wide, smooth road, as admirably made as all the roads I saw in Dalmatia - they are certainly, in every respect, excellent. After crossing the Jadera, the road lay all round the Gulf of Salona, the coast of which is called the Riviera dei Castelli, from the land having been granted in the fifteenth century to certain nobles on condition that they should build seven castles along the shore, in which the peasants could take refuge from the Turks, when these latter ravaged the country. The castles are now all ruined; but a village has sprung up round each, with its little church and campanile, and its comfortable-looking houses - spoiled, in my eyes, by the fashion of white-washing the roof-tiles. 

The land is very rich and fertile, and the fruit and almond gardens are crowded together below the corn fields, which are in their turn succeeded by the mulberry (*The mulberry is cultivated for the leaves throughout the countries bordering the Adriatic, in Syria, &c. as food for the sheep and cows: as most people seen in Italian Switzerland.) and olive groves which climb up the slopes as far as the barren rocky soil of the mountains will allow them to grow" (pp. 244-245).