Adriatic Sea

“ It has a sandy stretch of shore, on which the long, green-yellow rollers of the Adriatic broke into creamy foam, beneath the waning saffron light over Pesaro and the rosy rising of a full moon. This Adriatic sea carries an English mind home to many a little watering-place upon our coast. In colour and the shape of waves it resembles our Channel.
The sea-shore is Fano's great attraction; but the town has many churches, and some creditable pictures, as well as Roman antiquities. Giovanni Santi may here be seen almost as well as at Cagli ”

“ The little steamers that perform the small crossing—less than a crossing, a ferry—between Venice and the island of the Lido half an hour ago had arrived almost empty, but now they were sending people continually towards the shore, people who left the motionless waters of the shining, grey lagoon, crossed the island still green with little trees, still flourishing with growing flowers and plants, and came to gaze at the free, resonant Adriatic, with its wonderful green and white waves, with a sigh of relief and a smile of greeting for the magnificent Italian sea. ”

“ It is difficult to conceive the gay costumes and handsome features of the Albanese existing in these barren mountains that bind the Adriatic. It has been but a continued undulation of rock and sand, for three days past; and the closer we hug to the shore, the more we look at the broad canvass above us, and pray for wind. We make Capo d’Istria now, a small town nestled in a curve of the sea, and an hour or two more will bring us to Trieste, where we drop anchor, we hope for many an hour of novelty and pleasure. ”

“ The Friuli mountains rose in the north with the deep blue dyes of distance, breaking up the else level horizon; the shore of Italy lay like a low line-cloud in the west; the spot where the Brenta empties into the sea glowing in the blaze of the sunset. About us lay the smaller islands, the suburbs of the sea-city, and all among them, and up and down the Giudecca, and away off in the lagunes, were sprinkled the thousand gondolas, meeting and crossing in 250 one continued and silent panorama. The Lido, with its long wall hemmed in the bay, and beyond this lay the wide Adriatic. ”

“ It is as delightful to stand on the sea-wall on the Lido, near the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, where the lagoon opens into the Adriatic, and watch these barks coming in from the sea, one by one; glowing in the lovely light, changing the waters below into orange, red, and black, edged with gold. Sometimes, grouped into a mass, they cluster together in the deep places of the canals, or lie in a changing crowd together near the mouth of the Piave, nets, mast and sails one glow of shifting colour. ”

“ From time to time we saw in the distance the light of a gondola gliding over the waves, but it did not occur to us to call for help. The voice of the Adriatic breaking on the farther shore of the Lido reached our ears, monotonous and majestic. We indulged in countless enchanting dreams; we formed countless deliciously trivial plans. The moon sank slowly and was shrouded in the dark waves on the horizon, like a chaste virgin in her winding-sheet. We were as chaste as she, and she seemed to glance at us with a friendly expression before plunging into the sea. ”

“ The two shores of the Adriatic are totally different in their natural characteristics; the western being almost islandless and destitute of harbours, while the eastern is fringed by an almost continuous chain of islands and possesses several magnificent harbours which communicate with the open sea by narrow channels easily fortified, the rocks rising precipitously from the water along the greater part of the coast, whereas on the Italian side there is an equally continuous strip of alluvial plain between the foothills and the sea. ”

“ Less valuable as a grain-producing country than the alluvial district along the shore, it is hardly less smiling to the eye of the husbandman; it is far more varied in the nature of its products, and infinitely more beautiful. From many a snug homestead deep-niched in the hollow of some dark-green valley, a peep of the restless Adriatic, tumbling itself into white-crested breakers flashing in the southern sun, is seen across the sea side plains, through the valley’s mouth, like the section of a landscape through a telescope. ”

“ Beyond the buried Parade, the Adriatic rolled in sullenly, scarce visible save by a gleaming line of surf that lit up a narrow riband of its foreground; all but the breaking wave was hidden by a wild whirl of flakes that misted sea and sky into a grey nullity. Throughout the whole pleasure-city not a dog prowled nor a cat slunk nor a bird fluttered; not a footstep profaned the splendour of its snow. ”

“ The real life of the Adriatic coast seems to diminish visibly when one leaves Venice and drops down towards Ravenna; it has been drawn away inland to busy cities that turn their backs on the sea, and the sea itself has sullenly withdrawn, leaving ancient ports empty and useless, like stranded wrecks that will never feel the leap of the waves beneath their keels again. One should visit Ravenna either in the heyday of irrepressible youth, or much later in life when twilight is companionable and sympathetic ”

“ The result was that the end of the Adriatic Sea was the sole point of communication with the navigable sea, and Venice was a mart offering equal security against all enemies and tempests. The Po, the Brenta, and the Adige seemed to empty into the basin of the lagunes expressly to offer the Venetians an easy route by which they could take without danger or great expense all productions demanded by eastern Italy. Also it was a constant care with this growing republic to assure free navigation and all kinds of franchise on these waters and their numerous affluents. ”

“ Now the steamer would anchor off some picturesque little town, such as Pirano, crowned by its ancient fortress—a relic of the great republic which once ruled all this coast—and now bring up alongside the marble quay of some ancient Roman city, such as Pola, with its gigantic amphitheatre reflected on the purple Adriatic.
The scenery of the coast is very beautiful. The mountains are lofty and fantastically serrated, and cleft into profound fissures and chasms; while innumerable islands surround one on every side, so that one seems to be sailing on a large lake rather than a sea. ”

“ The Adriatic atmosphere has lowered our conceit. Skies or sails, lighthouse or shore, each object is always further off than we suppose. Prudent now, we hesitate to say whether Corfu is thirty miles away, or that this pale line of the Otranto coast is not a cloud resting on the water. We are not wrong to mistrust ourselves. Corfu is fifty miles away, and this imagined cloud is the coast of Italy. ”

“ Something in this woodyard, the building of the rafts, the lapping of the inflowing tide against them, its waves twisted in some angle into a petulant restlessness, seems to carry us back to the primeval days before the historic settlement of the fugitives from the great mainland cities, back to the manners of the humble fishermen who lived a hard and frugal life among the low islands of the Adriatic, in constant commerce with their patron the sea, in constant vigilance against his aggression. ”

“ But coast-line is not enough; land and sea must be wedded as well as approximated. The Doge of Venice went annually forth to wed the Adriatic in behalf of its queen, and to cast into its bosom the symbolic ring; but Nature alone can really join the hands of ocean and main. ”

“ In old heathen times, on the shore of the Adriatic lived a little girl whose greatest pleasure was to wander by the side of the lonely sea. She liked better to sit on a high rock with the spray just tossing against her feet, than to play with her village companions, who laughed at her for her wild ways, and asked her if she were the child of Neptune, and if she dwelt in a shell palace under the water; although they knew very well that old Menos, the fisherman, was her father, and that she lived in a little hut, just above the line of seaweed which the highest tides leave upon the beach. ”

“ At length she reached her own chamber, spacious, desolate, and lofty, like the rest, with high lattices that opened towards the Adriatic. It brought gloomy images to her mind, but the view of the Adriatic soon gave her others more airy, among which was that of the sea-nymph, whose delights she had before amused herself with picturing ”

“ We know, from the testimony of Strabo, that Ravenna stood among lagunes in the time of Augustus, as Venice does now; but at present Ravenna is a league distant from the shore. Spina [128] had been built by the Greeks at the edge of the sea; yet in Strabo’s time it was ninety stadia from it, and is now destroyed. Adria in Lombardy, which gave name to the Adriatic sea, and of which it was, somewhat more than twenty centuries ago, the principal port, is now six leagues distant from it. ”

“ The soil was dry and fertile, the air is pure and wholesome, and, though extremely hot during the summer months, this country seldom feels those sultry and noxious winds to which the coasts of Istria and some parts of Italy are exposed. The views from the palace are no less beautiful than the soil and climate were inviting. Towards the west lies the fertile shore that stretches along the Adriatic, in which a number of small islands are scattered in such a manner as to give this part of the sea the appearance of a great lake. ”

“ Mr Stevenson, in his observations upon the bed of the German Ocean and British Channel, maintains that the level of the sea is continually rising, and has been very sensibly elevated within the last three centuries. Fortis asserts the same of some parts of the Adriatic sea. ”

“ And there is the Adriatic. When Austria made the frontier, the sea-power question was not as important as it has since become. The east coast of the Adriatic was a wild hinterland that might be left to the rude peoples of Montenegro and Albania. But it has come into the world since then. Add to this that the Italian shore of the Adriatic is notably without good harbors and indefensible, and one has all the elements of the strategic situation. All fears would be superfluous if Austria, the old bully at the north, would keep quiet: the Triple Alliance served well enough for over thirty years. ”

“ As to the bottom of the basin of the sea, it seems to have inequalities similar to those which the surface of continents exhibits; if it were dried up, it would present mountains, valleys, and plains. It is inhabited almost throughout its whole extent by an immense quantity of testaceous animals, or covered with sand and gravel. It was thus that Donati found the bottom of the Adriatic sea ”

“ In our parlance all that is not the Adriatic is the Mediterranean, but the Italians only give this name to the waters that separate Italy and Spain from Africa, and differentiate the remainder as the Ligurean Sea—in the Bay of Genoa, the Tyrrhenian that Rome and Naples contemplate, and the Ionian, which washes up from Sicily under Italy’s instep in the Gulf of Taranto. ”

“ In such a configuration of land and water the state of the tide makes a striking difference in the scene. And unlike the rest of the Mediterranean, the Adriatic does possess a tide, small, it is true, in comparison with the great tides of ocean—for the whole difference between high and low water at the flood is not more than six feet, and the average flow is said not to amount to more than two feet six inches—but even this flux is sufficient to produce large tracts of sea which the reflux converts into square miles of oozy sand. ”

“ The Adriatic is our private estate. The cruisers make use of it as if Austria did not exist. They ascend it, circle about, stop in front [30] of the islands, challenge the coasts, without a single visible enemy’s attacking them. Doubtless the submarines come out daily from Cattaro in quest of the prize booty that our vessels would make. But either chance or our vigilance has prevented the disaster. We watch, we are worn out; nothing happens. Sometimes in the West, low on the water, trails the Italian coast; smoke floats over Otranto or Brindisi ”

“ The deepest part of the sea lies east of Monte Gargano, south of Ragusa, and west of Durazzo, where a large basin gives depths of 500 fathoms and upwards, and a small area in the south of this basin falls below 800. The mean depth of the sea is estimated at 133 fathoms. The bora (north-east wind) , and the prevalence of sudden squalls from this quarter or the south-east, are dangers to navigation in winter. Tidal movement is slight. ”

“ In less than four centuries, the commerce which had flourished on the Adriatic was to pass to England, and that other English Empire still more remote. Venice can never regain her former supremacy. Civilization has passed, and left her standing in the sea. But though she can never again take the lead of other nations, she may still have a happy and a prosperous future. There is the commerce of the Mediterranean, for which, as before, she holds a commanding position at the head of the Adriatic. ”

“ In the Mediterranean the shore-line is altogether changed; towns, once on the coast, are far away inland; others have sunk beneath the sea. Islands, like Rhodes, have risen from the bottom. The North Adriatic, once a deep gulf, has now become shallow; there are leaning towers and inclining temples that have sunk with the settling of the earth. On the opposite extremity of Europe, the Scandinavian peninsula furnishes an instance of slow secular motion, the northern part rising gradually above the sea at the rate of about four feet in a century. ”