History

It's one thing to visit a city like Dubrovnik, and admire the walls and cannons put up for defence from outsiders in the middle ages. It is another to see the bullet holes, spattered here and there on the stone street signs, and to look up at the steep hills behind the city and imagine them populated with narrow-eyed snipers.


We have mostly made this a tour of old cities, staying in the 'old towns' of Athens, Hania, Bologna, Zadar, Dubronik and Naples. We have had one real excursion into 'nature' – the Samaria Gorge – and a 'rural' experience in Santorini, but in the main, we are here to experience a depth and continuity of settled, solid 'civilization' that is not bodied forth in any part of New Zealand's very different history and geography.


But. In some senses, New Zealand, at least in the last 100 years, is more civilised than almost any part of Europe.


The old town of Dubrovnik is on a jutting peninsula: sea on three sides, and the curve behind an amphitheater of stark, steep hills.


In modern warfare, a shooting gallery.


Most of the old town is unmarked – there are few signs that less 1 8 years ago, the town was under siege. We saw one roofless house that may have been a war casualty, and few buildings on street corners with a spray of bullet holes up the walls.


Mostly the city and the country have put themselves back together after the lacuna of communism and civil war, rejoining (for better, and no doubt in some parts, for worse), the mainstream of world history.


In Crete we were near to Maleme, and the graves of many New Zealand and European
soldiers.


On the train from Rome to Naples, we traversed land that looks fruitful, tamed, obedient, a castle or ruined villa in the distance adding shape and mastery, like Stevens' jar in Tennessee.


But the land does not just have layers of peasant work and the ruins and still standing palaces and pleasure homes of kings and princes: it also has the discreet scars of more recent trauma, fought and felt with a depth and continuity that, in a distant island country (albeit with our own divisions and injustices), is hard to credit.