“The harsh, pungent ink is the least desirable part of the squid. As Venetian cooks have shown, it’s only the mellow, velvety, warm-tasting ink of cuttlefish—seppie—that is suitable for pasta sauce, risotto, and other black dishes.”
—Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (1992)
If the Super Bowl can deploy Roman numerals with the maximum of embarrassing pretentiousness, then so can I, and as such, Euro XLVI (since the first one in the year MCMLXXXV) has successfully concluded.
Euro XLVI was a warm late autumn week spent in the Croatian port city of Split, and speaking as the owner of a rapidly deteriorating arthritic left hip scheduled to be replaced in early December, allow me to observe that using a cane while hobbling through a hilly European city with ubiquitous stairs, cobblestones and marble surfaces in the central area wasn’t the easiest of assignments undertaken during my Euro Roman Numeral career.
But pain, while annoying, is an acceptable tradeoff for not being in Europe at all.
Split is perched on the Adriatic coast of Croatia as part of the region known thoughout history as Dalmatia. As a nation, Croatian independence helped trigger the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s, and now, three decades, Croatia is a European Union member state.
Split’s primary attraction is its venerable city center, which has evolved directly from the handy template of a 7.5-acre walled palace complex built 1,700 years ago by the Roman emperor Diocletian, presumably as a “modest” retirement villa for a man of his stature.
Today it’s car-free oasis of marble streets and buildings from Diocletian’s time as well as every era since, as structures have been added to the Roman superstructure and subtracted from it, creating a unique, helter-skelter architectural mélange.
In short, Diocletian’s digs are an example of municipal adaptive reuse on steroids.
From a Split tourist’s point of view, a simple budgetary rule applies. Purchases inside Diocletian’s walls are more expensive than those outside it, often modestly so, but on occasion rising to the level of extortionate; a draft beer in Split shouldn’t cost 8 Euros, ever. A good rule of thumb is to follow the lead of the locals. They’ll patronize cafes in the palace vicinity, just not the ones overpriced for visitors.
Similarly, the further one...Read more
