Rambles in Istria, Dalmatia and Montenegro — Reading Notes

A Journey in Fragments

The book is built from discrete episodes rather than a continuous itinerary. Chapters are titled by location or event—A Conversation, On the Danube, First View of the Adriatic—and within each the author freely digresses. A description of Pola’s amphitheatre gives way to a note on the band’s lamp arrangement; a conversation with a Montenegrin chief leads to a meditation on the local tobacco. This fragmentary quality is not a flaw but a deliberate reflection of the rambling mode. The reader is invited to follow the author’s associative leaps, from the Roman past to the Austrian present, from the comfort of a café to the rigours of a mountain pass. The structure mirrors the unpredictability of travel itself, where the most memorable moments often arise from chance encounters or unexpected detours.

Recurring Images: Stone, Water, and Light

Three images recur with notable frequency. Stone appears in multiple forms: the Roman amphitheatre at Pola, the “enormously thick slabs” of café tables in Cattaro, the rocky terrain of the Karst. The author is drawn to the materiality of stone, its sound when struck, its endurance through time. Water is ever-present—the Adriatic, the Danube, the subterranean streams of the Karst—and often marks transitions between scenes. Light shifts with the time of day: the “delicious balmy feeling” of twilight in Cattaro, the threat of being “roasted” on Montenegrin rocks at noon. These elements are not merely descriptive; they structure the narrative’s rhythm, providing a sensory anchor amid the constant movement.

Movement Between Scenes: The Art of Transition

The author handles transitions with a deftness that belies the book’s casual tone. A typical shift might begin with a physical action—“Having returned from the opposite side of the water”—then move to a social observation, then to a historical aside, before settling into a new scene. The journey from Trieste to Cattaro, for instance, is not a simple A-to-B account; it includes a flying visit to San Canziano, a thunderstorm, and a digression on the Karst’s wild scenery. These transitions often hinge on a sensory detail: the sound of a band, the taste of coffee, the feel of cooler air from the mountains. By foregrounding the traveller’s immediate experience, the author makes the reader feel the passage from one place to another as a lived, embodied process.

Encounters and Voices

The narrative is populated by a series of interlocutors whose voices break the author’s monologue. There is the Dalmatian who comments on health in India, the Russian consul who introduces the Montenegrin chief Pero Pejovich, and the little beggar boy with “the finest pair of eyes.” These encounters are often brief but vividly rendered, and they serve to anchor the author’s observations in specific human interactions. The author does not claim deep knowledge of these figures; instead, they appear as fleeting presences that enrich the texture of the journey. The most extended dialogue—with Pejovich about the rain in Cattaro—reveals a wry humour and a willingness to let the local voice challenge the traveller’s romanticism. This interplay between the author’s perspective and those he meets gives the book a dialogic quality rare in travel writing of the period.

Readers approaching Rambles in Istria, Dalmatia and Montenegro should expect a work that values the incidental over the systematic. The author’s eye for detail—the shape of a table, the tone of a stone, the look of a beggar boy—makes even the most mundane scene vivid. The book rewards those who read it as a series of impressions rather than a guidebook, and who are willing to follow the author’s digressions with the same curiosity he brings to his travels.

I found myself thinking back on those rambles through Istria’s grey stone towns and Dalmatian shorelines, where every ruined wall seemed to hold a layer of someone’s quiet memory. That same gentle sensation drifted back when I opened Sand and Canvas: Narrative of adventures in Egypt with a sojourn among the artists in Rome — Story, Setting & Ideas, as if the very dust of those old paths had settled onto another page.