What this is
A register of real, named places on two shores of the Adriatic, and of the traffic that has crossed between them for three thousand years.
Seventy-two kilometres of open water separate the heel of Italy from the Albanian coast. That distance is short enough that neither shore has ever been able to ignore the other, and long enough that the two developed differently. This publication is an account of what stands on both sides: a Greek colony that Rome took over, a paved road east that began at a quay, Venetian and Ottoman towers built to watch the same sea, market towns stacked inland, lagoons the sea keeps rebuilding, and fifty Albanian-speaking towns in the south of Italy settled five centuries ago.
Every entry is a named place, located, dated by period rather than year, and described as built fabric — what it is made of, how it is put together, and what it was built to do. The register is the form because the subject is a list of places.
The name is older than the publication. It is not a cooperative, an agency or a programme: there is no membership, no funding, and nothing to join. It is a publication, written in English, and it carries no dates.
Photographs are credited beneath each figure. Map geometry is real and projected from coordinates; nothing on the maps is placed by eye.
