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Next to Naples, I know nothing in Europe more beautiful than this ill-named Quarnero. We saw a shot or so of the far-famed Whitehead torpedo, which now makes twenty-one miles an hour; and on Nov. 25 we began to run down the Gulf en route for Patras. It was a pleasure to emerge from the stern and gloomy Adriatic; and nothing could be more lovely than the first evening amongst the Ionian Islands.
The prospect which either of these plans opened was one of great fascination. What Italian can look across the sea to where the sun rises and forget that along that horizon lies a land colonised by Rome and guarded for four hundred years by Venice? Istria was marked out by Dante as the frontier province of Italy: Si come a Pola presso del Quarnero Che Italia chiude e i suoi termini bagna.
Pursuant to this arrangement we slept in a great barn of a hotel whose echoing corridors had, in happier days, been a favorite resort of the wealth and fashion of Hungary, but whose once costly furniture had been sadly dilapidated by the spurred boots of the Austrian staff officers who had used it as a headquarters; in the mornings we had our sugarless coffee and butterless war-bread on a lofty balcony commanding a superb panorama of the Istrian coast from Icici to Volosca and of the island-studded Bay of Quarnero, and commuted to and from Fiume in the big gray Lancia in which we had traveled along the line of the Armistice for upward of 2,000 miles.
Some of the cities were made municipia, and some colonies, and from this time Dalmatia was loyal to Rome. The Antonines erected important buildings in Jadera and Burnum, and they also fortified Salona. Roman Dalmatia included the whole coast from Istria to the Drina, part of Albania, all Montenegro, Herzegovina, Croatia, Servia, almost all Bosnia, and some of the islands of the Quarnero.
From 1126 the islands of the Quarnero belonged to Venice, but the peace of Zara in 1358 ceded Dalmatia to Hungary and Veglia with it; and, when Ladislas sold Dalmatia to Venice in 1409, Veglia was excluded, being formally ceded by the last Count Giovanni in 1480.
Towards Abbazia the red soil becomes more abundant, the hills are terraced, and vegetation is more luxuriant, great chestnuts and bay-trees appear, and cypresses when Lovrana is reached. This north shore of the Quarnero, stretching to Fiume, is the Riviera of Austria. The Dinaric Alps surround it from Monte Maggiore, and the Liburnian Karst to the Velebits.
At the coming conclusion of peace Italy is to receive: the district of the Trentino; the whole of South Tyrol as far as its natural geographical boundary, thereby understood the Brenner; the city and district of Trieste; the provinces of Goerz and Gradisca, the whole of Istria as far as Quarnero, including Volosca and the Istrian islands of Cherso and Lussin, also the smaller islands of Plavnica, Unie, Canidolo, Palazzoli, as well as the island of St.
The sun-kissed waters of the Bay of Quarnero looked for all the world like a vast azure carpet strewn with a million sparkling diamonds; on our starboard quarter stretched the green-clad slopes of Istria, with the white villas of Abbazia peeping coyly out from amid the groves of pine and laurel; to the eastward the bleak brown peaks of the Dinaric Alps rose, savage, mysterious, forbidding, against the cloudless summer sky.
The view from the harbour at Fiume in the afternoon is delightful, the mass of Monte Syss on Cherso guarding the entrance to the Quarnero on one side, while the many spurs of the Monte Maggiore range on the other troop to the sea, blue in the shadow, and paling and lowering with greater distance. Fiume is one of the few towns along the coast in which the Italians are in the majority.
It lies at the north-eastern end of the Bay of the Quarnero, and is the chief seaport of Hungary, to which it has belonged in the main since the beginning of the twelfth century; and permanently since 1870. Though it was a thriving town in the Middle Ages, and existed in Roman times, there is very little to be seen older than the period of the late Renaissance.
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