So, on my second trip to Croatia, I have finally made it to Dubrovnik. Let me get one thing out of the way first: this place is a total tourist trap. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as bad.

 Now that that’s been said, I can go on to explore some of the ideas that this city, Ragusa–now called Dubrovnik, but always, before it became a tourist trap, better known under the other name–has set moving in my mind. Because it may be a tourist trap, but it’s one not to be missed.

Ragusa must have been, until its surrender to Napoleon in 1808, the archetypal walled city. Walking its narrow streets today, one can begin to recover, in imagination at least, something of what it might have been to live in such a place. The territory controlled by the Republic of Ragusa, at its largest, covered perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometers of coastline in a narrow strip extending to either side of the city. The city itself is tiny–though impressive by the standards of Dalmatia, it is very much smaller than its greatest rival, Venice, not to mention Constantinople/Istanbul–heavily fortified, and strangely, faces inward. That is to say, its central street/plaza (known interchangeably, and appropriately, as both Plaza and Stradun), sits at the bottom of the city, while the narrow side streets rise steeply to either side towards the walls. The city therefore, looks upon itself, while presenting blank walls to the rest of the world.

What would it have been like to live in such a city, dominated as it was by a small number of families who traced their ascendancy back to the twelfth century and beyond? I’ve been reading Rebecca West, who in many ways is quite horrifying, and who expressed distaste for Dubrovnik. But she’s influenced me in an interesting way as well: prompting me to imagine more vividly, perhaps, the lives people led in the past, and particularly the lives of women. What was it like to be a woman of sixteenth century Ragusa? I can hardly imagine such a self-enclosed, self-referential world. One’s neighbors were, perhaps, only an arm’s length away across a narrow stone street–and they, their grandparents, and their grandparents’ grandparents, had all spent their lives trying to peer into your own and your ancestors’ windows, watching.