26 July 2026

Greetings!

Greetings again from lovely Athens!

This has been a busy and enjoyable week onboard Seabourn Quest. Highlights included a beautiful day in Agios Nikolaos on Crete, the lovely island of Kos, and Ephesus. Longtime readers of this newsletter may recall my account of the marvelous evening performance at Ephesus I attended when working on Seabourn Encore last year. I was fortunate enough to repeat this signature Seabourn experience last week and it lived up to all my recollections. This is a fabulous event held in the Odeon at Ephesus in the evening after all the visitors have quit the site. It is a very unique way to experience this special place, and I feel very privileged to have repeated the experience again this year.
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The surprise of the week however, was a small island that was entirely new to me, with an outsized and very quirky history/ Tucked into the Dodecanese just north of Rhodes, the little island of Symi once grew rich on a single, dangerous trade: sponge diving. Its men were the finest free divers in the Mediterranean, going down on a single lungful of air behind a weighted stone, the skandalopetra, that steered them to the beds far below. It was punishing, beautiful work, and it made the island wealthy enough to line its harbor with the neoclassical mansions that still climb the hillsides today: many lovingly rebuilt after extensive damage during World War II.

Then came the machine. By the late nineteenth century the sponge fleets had adopted the skafandro, the copper-helmeted diving suit fed by air pumped down a hose from the boat above. It let a man go deeper and stay down far longer than nature ever intended, and it exacted a terrible price: a whole generation of young divers surfaced too fast and were crippled or killed by a disease no one yet understood. That grief is written into the statuary of these islands. On Kalymnos, on the sponge docks of Tarpon Springs in Florida where the Dodecanese divers later settled, and in harbor towns across the Aegean, you still find the same monument: a bronze diver in his heavy helmet and weighted boots, at once heroic and mournful.

It was two Symi boats, the Efterpi and the Kalliopi, captained by Dimitrios Kontos, that carried the trade into history. Driven by a storm to shelter off the barren island of Antikythera on Holy Tuesday in the spring of 1900, they sent a diver down almost idly, and at forty-two meters he found something no one was looking for: a ship two thousand years wrecked, its cargo strewn across the seabed. The diver surfaced shaken, describing a heap of dead men below and clutching the bronze hand of a statue as proof. Once the crew had carried word home to Symi, the divers returned with the backing of the Greek navy and, over the year that followed, brought up 378 treasures, sculptures, glass, bronze vessels, jewelry, and coins, in what is now regarded as the first major underwater archaeological excavation in history.

Two objects from that haul still astonish. One is the Antikythera Youth, a life-size bronze cast in the fourth century BC, whose outstretched hand was the very first thing the divers touched.

The other, corroded past recognition when it broke the surface, is the single most extraordinary object to survive from antiquity: the Antikythera mechanism, the world's oldest known analog computer, no bigger than a shoebox, whose bronze gears modeled the heavens, tracked the five known planets, predicted eclipses of the Sun and Moon, and even counted down the four-year cycle to the Olympic Games. It makes a fitting patron for this edition, devoted as it is to the deep and often surprising wisdom of the ancient world, and to the coasts where you can still feel it lying just beneath the surface.

I’m planning a lengthy visit to the Archeological Museum in Athens next month to see the Antikythera Device, as well as its other treasures. The museum is closing soon for lengthy renovations. Find out more in my 8 Hour Guide to Athens.

For all these reasons, I was very excited to visit Symi for the first time last week, and it did not disappoint: what a charming small port, a bit sleepy until the flotilla of ferries from Rhodes and Lindos dock and the masses swell the streets. I chose to make it a beach day, but there was also time for sponge shopping (who knew there were so many different kinds of sponges??) I would return with the greatest of pleasure to spend more time exploring this magnificent island.

As a subscriber to the Destination Curation Newsletter, you have access to my cruise schedule , which you can visit here. If any of these voyages align with your travel plans, I'd love to share the journey with you.

Long before Athens had a philosopher or Rome a road, the scribes of Mesopotamia were pressing the world's first ideas into wet clay. In The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Selena Wisnom takes us inside the great library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and makes the astonishing case that our writing, law, mathematics, astronomy, and literature all trace back to these tablets. What I admire most is that Wisnom, who reads Akkadian and Sumerian, translates directly from the source, so we hear these ancient voices without a middleman. She organizes the book by theme rather than by dynasty, which lets the deep patterns surface: the flood story that predates Noah, the omens that steered kings, the medicine and mathematics we still lean on. For the traveler bound for the Eastern Mediterranean or the Middle East, this is essential preparation. Read it, and the museums of Istanbul, the ruins of Ephesus, and the layered stones of Jerusalem stop being isolated wonders and become chapters in one long human story that began between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Scholarly, generous, and never dull, it is that rare book that turns ruins into narrative.

Dubrovnik is easy to love at first glance, all sunlit stone, red roofs, and seawalls above the Adriatic. Robin Harris's Dubrovnik: A History explains why it is even more impressive once you know what that stone has survived. This is a full, serious history of the city the world knew for centuries as Ragusa, a maritime republic that held its independence between Venice, the Ottomans, and the Habsburgs not through size but through strategy: trade, diplomacy, and the wisdom to make itself useful without ever becoming a prize. Harris treats Dubrovnik as a protagonist rather than a footnote in someone else's empire, and the effect on a visitor is transformative. Read him, and the walls stop being decorative. They become the outward expression of a worldview: protect the port, protect the independence, protect the reputation. The Adriatic reveals itself as a highway rather than a backdrop, and the compact Old Town becomes a deliberately maintained story of resilience and reinvention. If you like travel that comes with context, this is the rare history that makes a destination richer rather than heavier. My full review explains exactly what it adds to a single day ashore.

This is one of the books featured on my Adriatic Reading List.

Dalmatian cooking hides its sophistication behind a near-religious plainness: a whole sea bass, salt, good oil, a wedge of lemon, a few sprigs of wild rosemary pulled off the hillside, and nothing else. The first time you eat this way, you suspect the cook of laziness; by the fourth meal, you realize you are tasting one of the most disciplined cuisines in Europe. Ino Kuvačić's Dalmatia: Recipes from Croatia's Mediterranean Coast is the book that finally explains, in English and with real authority, how a tradition this frugal became this good. Kuvačić, a Split native who carried his grandmother's recipes to Melbourne, gives us more than a hundred recipes: silky blitva, the fisherman's stew brudet, the great Sunday pašticada braised for days in red wine, octopus cooked under a peka bell in glowing embers. Read him before you sail, and Split's market and every stone-walled konoba rearrange themselves into something you can actually read. I've reviewed it in full for travelers who want to taste the coast, not merely photograph it. My own copy is happily spattered and warped, which tells you everything you need to know.

Be sure to check in with the Destination Resources Reading Lists, which I update regularly with new books, podcasts, TV and film, and other resources designed to make your travel meaningful. I did a big update recently, changing the format to make it easier to navigate. Visit via this link!

Before Rome made the Adriatic its own, the coast belonged to the Illyrians, the seafaring tribes whose fast, low ships made them the terror of Mediterranean merchants. In this episode of The Ancients, host Tristan Hughes reconstructs a world we rarely hear about: the pirate confederations of the eastern Adriatic, the formidable Queen Teuta (hands down favorite Adriatic heroine) who dared to defy a Roman embassy, and the wars that finally pulled Rome across the water and deep into the Balkans. It is the ideal primer for anyone sailing the Dalmatian coast, because these are the people who gave Illyria its name and once haunted every harbor from Zadar to Kotor. Illyria is the Adriatic before the relentless invasions of the Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Ottomans, and Habsburgs impose their cultural and political layers upon the littoral. Tristan Hughes, as ever, is a clear, enthusiastic guide, and at forty-odd minutes it slips easily into a single sea day.

For more on Adriatic history, visit: A Short History of the Adriatic: Illyria to Independence.

For travelers who like to know how the modern map was drawn, Reichs & Republics: The German History Podcast is a serious and rewarding listen. Produced by the team at Battle Guide, and featuring prominent German Historian Katja Hoyer, author of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany, and (my personal favorite) Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, it traces the long, fractured story of German-speaking Europe, from the patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire through unification, the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, and the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The hosts have a documentarian's eye for detail and a welcome refusal to flatten complexity, which makes even familiar chapters feel freshly considered. I am working on a complicated talk on the history of Germany for a Baltic cruise in 2027, and this podcast has really widened my perspective. German history is often dominated by the Third Reich, but this podcast provides so much more than those dark chapters. If your travels take you into Central Europe, or you simply want the backstory to the empires whose rivalries shaped everywhere from the Rhine to the Adriatic, this is a first-rate companion for the long flight over.

Few novels capture a place and a passing world as completely as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, his only book, written as he watched his own Sicilian aristocracy fade into history. In this episode of The Book Club, Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett make the case that it may be the greatest historical novel ever written, and it is hard to argue. They range over Lampedusa's family, the upheavals of the Risorgimento that frame the story, and that famous line about everything changing so that everything can stay the same. I agree with Dominic and Tabby that this is one of the more sensual historical novels of all time: nothing in literature quite matches its evocative descriptions. If you are bound for Palermo or the Sicilian interior, The Leopard is ideal preparation, turning sun-bleached palazzi and dusty hill towns into the stage of a vanished, unforgettable world. Erudite, evocative and great fun. This podcast gives a ton of backstory about the author’s life and how he crafts this masterpiece.

• ​A Short History of the Adriatic: Illyria to Independence​
• ​The Greek Island the Ottomans Never Took​
• ​Windmills Were Never Decoration on This Greek Island​
• ​The Square Where Perhaps Medicine Was Born​
• ​Diocletian's Palace in Split​
• ​The Adriatic Reading List: 20 Books for a Voyage Along Europe's Most Layered Coast​
• ​The Cathedral Built Without Nails: A Visit to Šibenik, Croatia​
• ​25 Dishes Every Traveler Should Try in the Adriatic​
• ​Adriatic Book Review: Robert D. Kaplan's Grand Tour of Europe's Most Overlooked Sea​
• ​Balkans Book Review: Misha Glenny's Sweeping History​
• ​The Rise of Islam: From Desert Sands to a Global Civilization​
• ​Passionate Nomad: The Freya Stark Biography Every Traveler Should Read​

We sail onwards!

Next week is packed full of highlights: Santorini, Monevasia, Delphi, and Sarande, Albania! I will debut my new lecture on Albanian history, about which I am a little nervous, but I’ve been diligently practicing pronouncing all of the names and hopefully will get them all right on the day.

I hope to find time to continue writing: I’m finalizing two new 8 Hour Guides for the Adriatic, and I’m deep into a new talk about this history of Ibiza…not just a party island!

I hope your summer is enjoyable and cool wherever you are spending it

I hope you've enjoyed this edition of the Destination Curation | Books for Travelers Newsletter.

If you'd like to share it with a friend, just forward t Or copy and paste the URL and share it in any way you wish! I deeply appreciate your support for my work!

I love hearing from you -- let me know how I can help make your travel meaningful. I am rolling out new 8-Hour Guides to popular cruise destinations and love getting suggestions for new ones from this amazing community of readers.

Did you miss my last newsletter? Here are links to the previous three editions.

• ​🇭🇷 Salient Šibenik​
• ​📚 Books for Travelers: Time for The Odyssey!​
• ​🇭🇷 Zesty Zadar: Croatia's Dazzling Layered City​

Safe onward travels!

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