I’ve always been snooty about mass tourism while, naturally, often partaking in it. I write this in the tiny walled Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Getting here was a dispiriting business. Heathrow felt unsettlingly odd: eerily empty, yet too busy. Walking in there, I donned a mask and didn’t remove it until I left the terminal building at Dubrovnik, only to be asked by the taxi driver to put it back on when I got into his cab.
The entrance to the restaurant in the hotel resembles scenes from MASH, when the doctors scramble to be ready for incoming wounded. Masks and latex gloves are hurriedly donned so we can be cleared to commence the dissection of the breakfast buffet.
The weather has been unusually poor, but the old town is enchanting in any light. And a guide called Roberto De Lorenzo has made me see tourism in a different light. He is from a long line of residents of the old town. I said how nice it must be for him to have a bit more space this year, without the cruise ships disgorging their human cargo every five minutes. But he had no truck with this line of thought.
“When the cruise ships come, and thousands and thousands of people are packed in here, in the summer heat, it feels to me like the most authentic experience you could have of Dubrovnik, as it was in the height of its trading powers. You think then it was quiet and peaceful? No, it was totally crowded and mad, just like it normally is here at this time of year. Who are we to complain? It was the lively interaction of crowds from around the world that made us great in the first place. If we’d stayed closed to the world, we’d still be a fishing village.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. Roberto is like a living embodiment of the great trading era. He is fluent in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Mandarin. But wherever you are from, look him up if you happen this way.
