Captain Greybeard

Going underground is becoming a recurring theme of my Croatian voyage aboard Aegean Odyssey. On the day's organised walking tour of Split, passengers were shown around Diocletian's Palace, a remarkable walled city built as a retirement home by the Roman emperor, and since occupied by a series of squatters who all left their mark without doing enough damage to the original to prevent it deservedly becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site. Above ground it is spectacular enough, with a mausoleum built to contain the emperor's body and then later - and ironically in view of the number of Christians Diocletian [...]

My guidebook to Croatia, from the excellent Bradt series, runs to 392 pages, of which five and a half are devoted to the city of Zadar. Of the church museum, part of the Benedictine convent attached to the 16th Century St Mary's Church, it says only that it "houses a wonderful collection of reliquaries, paintings and sculpture." That one brief line serves only to disguise the wealth of treasures that greeted the unsuspecting passengers on tour from Voyages to Antiquity's Aegean Odyssey this morning. For a start, I don't think any of us expected to be welcomed by one of [...]

The skies over Venice turned from blue to black and then to vivid orange as a thunderstorm passed overhead at sunset. Spurred on by a sirocco wind and an almost full moon, high tide threatened to spill from the lagoon into Piazza San Marco, where raised duckboards were ready to provide a dry path for the visitors. So what did I choose to do? Go underground, of course, which also meant I was descending below sea level. As one of the passengers from Voyages to Antiquity's Aegean Odyssey afforded the rare privilege of visiting the basilica of St Mark after [...]