Adriatic Sea Map

The Adriatic is a long, narrow arm of the Mediterranean, about five hundred miles from the lagoons around Venice to the Strait of Otranto, where the heel of Italy nearly touches Albania. Its two shores could hardly be less alike. The Italian side is low and mostly straight, a line of beach towns from Ravenna and Rimini past Ancona to the Gargano spur at Vieste, then the flat Apulian coast of Bari, Brindisi and Otranto. The eastern side is limestone, drowned mountains broken into more than a thousand islands, most of them Croatian: Cres and Mali Lošinj off the Kvarner Gulf, the chains off Zadar and Šibenik, Brač and Korčula near Split, then Dubrovnik, the coast of Montenegro at Budva and Ulcinj, and Albania at Durrës and Vlorë.

For most of a thousand years this was Venice’s sea. The Republic grew out of the mudflats of its lagoon, where refugees from the mainland drove wooden pilings into the marsh, and it became a maritime empire built on harbors rather than land: Istria, the Dalmatian ports, the Bay of Kotor, and farther south the Ionian Islands at the bottom of this map. Venice held Piran from 1283 until the Republic fell to Napoleon in 1797, and across the whole eastern shore the stone lions of Saint Mark, the loggias and the copies of its campanile still mark where it ruled.

The map also reaches west, over the Tyrrhenian Sea to Corsica and Sardinia, down to the Aeolian Islands and Sicily, and across to Pantelleria and the Tunisian coast at Tunis, Bizerte and Hammamet, the sea lanes Venice competed for with Genoa and the corsairs of North Africa.

The Venetian Adriatic

The four towns I lettered in red are the ones I wrote about in The Architecture of Emptiness and the Venice of Tomorrow: Venice, which I walked at dawn before the crowds arrived, then Rovinj on the Istrian coast, the walled hill town of Motovun, and Piran across the border in Slovenia. My drawings from the same trip, including St. Mark’s Basilica, the port of Piran and a plate of Adriatic prawns in Rovinj, are in my Venice & the Adriatic Sketch Journal. For the island at the bottom of the map, see my Sicily map.