This was a city that mattered almost 3,000 years ago, a stepping stone from Greece to Italy. Unfortunately for Corfu, armies seeking to get across the final miles of the Adriatic Sea … aren’t as common as they were in the days of the Greeks and Romans.
Corfu at times made me think of the more battered parts of Los Angeles, from rusting cars parked in junk yards right on through the smog that cast a pall over the horizon.
We went ashore at our only Greek port of call on this cruise and decided, for lack of anything else particularly compelling, to take a cab up the mountain behind Corfu town to a museum dedicated to Achilles, one of the heroes of Homer’s Iliad.
The Achilleion, as it is rendered from Greek to English, at least has an interesting back story.
It starts with the glamorous Empress Elisabeth, taken as a wife in 1854 by Franz Josef, top man in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which at the time was a major player in European politics.
The world is full of weird little places. Just have to go out and look around a bit, and you will find one.
Such as Kotor, a walled city of 13,000 people in the Republic of Montenegro, which has been independent only since 2006 — and which I can add to the list of Nations I Have Visited.
From Dubrovnik, a Croatian town with lots of character, we floated down the Adriatic to Kotor, a Montenegrin town with … lots of character, but not refined to occasional boredom, as is the case in Dubrovnik.
Kotor is surrounded by mountains, and is at the end of a winding channel of seawater that bores deep into the hills and provides some fine places to fish or sail or build a walled city.
It also is a very good place to invite stray cats to become semi-members of the family. But more on that in a moment.
Dubrovnik has had an interesting century or so. During most of that 100 years it was known for plenty of sun, steep geography, charm and low cost.
Then came a war, in the early 1990s, and a generation later something far less serious, but perhaps more thoroughly advertised, the ultra-popular cable-TV series “Game of Thrones”, much of which featured scenes filmed in and around Dubrovnik — mostly because it has buildings that look medieval.
The Croatian city of Split is best-known for one big series of buildings: Diocletian’s Palace.
Diocletian was the emperor of Rome from 284 to 305 AD when he stepped down and moved in to a “palace” that compares favorably with any vanity project dreamed up in the Western world.
Diocletian’s Palace was built as his retirement home, and he might even have done enough for the empire to warrant the expense of a seven-acre (305,000 square feet) seaside site in what is now northern Croatia.
Diocletian was born to a family of low social status, but he had an outstanding career as a soldier that led to him becoming emperor in 284.
Unlike just about all the other emperors who mis-ruled Rome in the third century, Diocletian won victories in the field. He also had several good ideas about balancing the books of the empire, and how to defend it from inevitable invasions from outsiders.
He often is considered the key individual in reinvigorating a teetering empire and setting it on track to survive another 150 years.
He is little-known to much of the world, 1,700 years after he died, in 311 AD, but his reforms as well as the physical existence of his palace, much of which still stands, make him the leading citizen of Split, Croatia’s second-biggest city. Which we visited on a warm and sunny day.
Most every traveler loves Venice. Except, it seemed, me.
Venice? Not eager to go, not on any trip I made to nearby Italian cities or to nearby Austria.
But I apparently had been influenced by those who suggest the Queen of the Adriatic is overrun by tourists, or sometimes smells bad, or is too expensive to consider — because I had never made a real attempt to travel there.
That changed today, and I found I was completely wrong in my thinking, vis a vis Venezia.
We saw the city at its best tonight, and it made for some wonderful moments and memorable scenes, and left me grateful my feelings about the place had been exposed as … oh, stupidity.
We saw Venice at what might have been close to her best, and we did it by living out the Venice fantasy — riding in a gondola between some of the 120 islands and under some of the 400 bridges, absorbing the atmosphere on a balmy night — with the sun setting pink and golden, as if on cue.
It went something like this: I regained consciousness about 6 a.m., and thought the decisive Game 5 of the National League Division Series between the Dodgers and Washington Nationals ought to be over, back in Los Angeles. And I did not expect good news, especially when I saw the game was tied at 3-3 in the 10th inning.
A few minutes later, it ended 7-3, with the Dodgers relievers having failed, first, to protect a 3-1 lead turned over to them by Walker Buehler in the seventh inning, then giving up a grand slam in the 10th to end it.
The home run era has been fun. I think a consensus has developed among baseball people that it is beginning to grow tiresome and that something will soon need to be done to make baseball look more like baseball.
Know who wrote that? Bill James, the man whose insights jump-started baseball’s advanced metrics revolution back in the 1970s.
Know when he wrote that? In 2001.
I wonder what he thinks now, after the real Home Run Era landed in the bleachers all around the game?
In 2001, Major Leaguers hit 5,458 home runs.
In 2019, nearly two decades later?
MLB hitters mashed a record 6,776 homers.
All those home runs! This season’s totals were half again as many hit just five seasons ago — 4,186, in 2014.
Adding 2,600 homers has changed the game. And not in a good way.
In the 1961 Major League Baseball season, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth’s homer record of 60, set in 1927.
However, many fans of the Bambino, and perhaps those not enthralled by the laconic Maris one-upping the charismatic Ruth, clamored for an “asterisk” to be added to Maris’s total.
Why? Because Maris’s 61 homers came in baseball’s inaugural 162-game season, which tacked on eight extra games to the 154-game season Ruth and the ’27 Yankees had in 1927.
Midway through the 1961 season, no less than the commissioner of baseball, Ford Frick, suggested that the any new homer record “should be shown separately in the record books, with some distinctive mark” next to it indicating it had been done in a 162-game season.
A day later, prominent New York sports writer Dick Young suggested the asterisk.
Why are we talking about Ruth and Maris and records and asterisks?
Because the 2019 Los Angeles Dodgers have been quick to make clear that they set a franchise record with 106 victories, beating the 105 rung up by the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers who, like Ruth, spotted their future club eight additional games.
Just watched the United States national rugby team play in the ninth edition of the Rugby World Cup. On my television, here in France. Live. With French-speaking announcers. Who knew?
It went badly for the Yanks — as it nearly always does.
Final score: England 45, United States 7.
The highlight for the Eagles may have been the national anthem. The lads sang it with great enthusiasm. “And the home of the brave … who are about to get crushed.”
Actually, it ended with “brave” but you could include the other bit with some certainty. The Yanks have been getting steamrolled by “real” rugby countries since they started appearing at the quadrennial tournament in 1999.
What does USA Rugby have to show for all its efforts?
Two pool-play victories in six tournaments.
Among the defeats? There was 53-8 to Ireland in 1999 … 51-9 to France in 2003 … 64-15 to South Africa in 2007 … 67-5 to Australia in 2011 … 64-0 to South Africa in 2015 … and England 45-7 in 2019.
These are blowouts of such severity that the question has to be asked: Is this worth doing?
