Enid says a novel should be written about the passions that swirl in the world of geology. Our week in Florence at the International Geological Congress was a real eye opener for her. It was as if she had discovered a tribe whose members battled over dandelions or cloud formations.  I think anthropologists may be more peaceful because they don't have international rule-making bodies like we geologists do, leaving themselves with no way to attack one another.

Our rooms (found on the internet) were in the Palazzo Bombicci, built oh 500 years ago, accessed by marble staircases leading up from a two-story entrance hall no smaller than a zeppelin hangar. We entered directly from the street via a pair of 10-foot high solid oak doors, through which carriages of important people have rolled safely inside for centuries past. It may not have been the weather that was on their mind - Cosimo Medici had the great architect Vasari build him a personal, sealed corridor almost 1 km long that still runs from the ducal offices ("uffizi", in Italian - now the Uffizi Galleries) to the Pitti Palace on the other side of the river. A private hallway through the city seems like really inflated self indulgence, but apparently the Renaissance was full of people you had no interest in meeting, like assassins or typhoid carriers.

From our rooftop terrazo we sit and look out across the River Arno flowing in its canyon of pastel stucco buildings, to a hillside where mansions and monasteries peek out through the pines. Downstairs on the wall of the atrium is a marble plaque with a line engraved at about the level of my chin, noting that this was how high the Arno rose in November 4, 1844. Above this was added a second plaque, informing us that in November 6, 1966 the Arno flooded up to the "piano supra", or floor above. I hope they have boats ready when November 8, 2088 comes around.

The half-acre Piazza del Signoria, or Plaza of the Nobles, has been the center of Florence since the 12th century. The statuary in the piazza includes a marble muscle beach over in front of the town hall, accurately named Palazzo Vecchio, with a bulging "Hercules" towering over a very buff "Ajax" and a moodily flexing Michelangelo's "David". In the grand loggia, a covered platform from which city officials once read pronunziamente, stand a dozen masterworks depicting Greek and Hebrew mayhem, like Cellini's "Perseus With the Head of Medusa", Giambologna's "Rape of the Sabine Women" and "Hercules Battling the Centaur", Donatello's "Judith and Holofernes", Fedi's "Rape of Polyxena" and a copy of "Ajax and the Body of Patroclus", all at climactic moments. A police van was always stationed just below, unintentionally rounding out the impression of a major crime scene. Turning right, in three blocks one emerges at the famous Duomo, or great cathedral, of Santa Maria. This is so unimaginably huge and ornate, with rows of statues perched like white pigeons on its cliff-like façade, that it takes a minute or two to actually see any of it.

In Bari, where we went to catch the overnight ferry to Dubrovnik, we had a delightful seafood dinner once the waiter removed Enid's alarmingly undamaged octopus and brought it back safely grilled. At the ferry terminal we had plenty of time, sitting on our suitcases, for Enid (who had an Italian boyfriend long ago) to tune my ear to the singsong accent of southern Italy rising and falling all around us. Since most of the immigrants are from the south we Americans think all Italians talk like that.

Enid had never been in Dubrovnik, but it was just as I remembered from when our van of Van C's passed by 35 years earlier, on our way to Samos. Maybe better than I remembered, since the world has responded with torrents of money to rebuild this amazing place after Milosevic & Co spent a year trying to shell it into smithereens. We walked down the hill from our hotel to the Stare Grad, or old city, and spent a wonderful morning under a brilliant blue sky in 14th century Croatia. Then we had a leisurely lunch in the middle of the street. Dubrovnik, you see, does not allowed wheeled vehicles inside the walls. One unexpected effect of a century of shoe-shuffling is that the surface of the great central promenade, built of marble blocks what else, is polished to where it glimmers like wet ice.

Croatia and Montenegro are wrapped around Bosnia like an old dirty bandage, as if to keep it from contact with the Adriatic, and Dubrovnik is where the ragged ends are tied. The Croatian-Montegran border is only 25 km down the coast, and our final destination at Sveti Stefan was about 40 km further along as the crow flies. Lucky crow -- it took us over three hours. The slowest part was the trudge, dragging suitcases, along a mountain road between the border posts. At least we had rollie bags. At least they weren't shooting at each other.  The hottest part of the trip, by far, was the Montenegran bus, a tightly sealed solar incinerator that would have been towed off the road anywhere else. Not only did Serbia-Montenegro lose the war for a "Greater Serbia" (in which every inch of land ever occupied by any Serb-speaking entity in history was to be cleansed of subsequent Croatian or Bosnian or Greek or Albanian trespassers), but even afterwards when they got over it and just wanted to shoot some of their own private Albanians in Kossovo, the outside world kept them under a nearly total international embargo. This made new buses hard to get. Things are now on the mend, but they could start with some spelling books. We passed one RASTARAN and TORIST APARTMAN after another, a place to buy SOVENERS, and finally a DRAGSTORE. The last might have been worth a look but the bus chugged on, trailing clouds of sweaty steam from the cracks in our windows.

Our route was complicated by the fact that Montenegro is basically a cliff. Not being equipped with pontoons thank god we had no choice but to follow the water line all around Kotor Bay, where a huddle of 3,000-foot mountains stand hip deep in the Adriatic. The villages through which we passed were single rows of stone buildings glued to the seacliff above the docks, with just enough room at their front doors for donkey carts to get past. On two occasions therefore we had stop to wait while a file of rusty Fiats and Ladas backed up all the way to the edge of town to let us by, and once we met another bus and in our turn backed up to the edge of town. The cheerful old-fashioned courtesy of this was very pleasant. Eventually we reached the open coast at Budva, a mini-Dubrovnik founded on a Roman naval base, and got a cab to take us on to Sveti Stefan. The view, as we emerged from a grove of precipice-hugging pines, was like a fairy tale. Sveti Stefan is a combination Hopi village and Legoland, with buildings of limestone blocks and red tile roofs piled one atop another all over a tiny offshore island, connected to shore by a long causeway. Where was the hotel? We were looking at it -- thanks to Marshal Tito, who ordered the entire village to be emptied of its inhabitants in order to launch a tourist industry for Yugoslavia. Guests sleep in the fishermen's cottages and dine on a clifftop terrace under the stars where you can flick your cherry pits over the rail and into the sea far below.

In what way does Montenegro differ from its soon to be ex-partner Serbia? Aha, said our guide. We were on a (much nicer) bus two days later, for the “English tour” to the former capital of Cetinje (say-TIN-yeh) up in the Dinaric Alps, the formal name for these little hills. Before they joined the Kaiser's side in World War I, the Othmanli Turks, or what we call Ottomans, had ruled Serbia and everything else between the Danube and the Indian Ocean for 400 years -- except, aha, for tiny Montenegro, on its mile high pile of barren limestone with fewer than 600,000 people and “only stones to eat.” Their main export in Victorian times seems to have been royal princesses. As our guide put it, “The Montenegro Kink is called the father in law of Europe.” To house the courting princes Centinje acquired an amazing collection of grand and ornate embassies. They now serve as schools, libraries and museums, due to the government relocating to level ground after the Turks went away. The historic paintings in the museums suggest that the Montenegran self-image is pride and defiance. Everyday wear for the gentleman included two enormous pistolas jutting left and right from the sash, and feminine allure consisted of glaring like a tigress. Even the Serbian language lends itself to this up-yours image, with rows of tightly-wedged consonants interspersed with machine gun bursts of rolling r’s. Mothers call affectionately after the kids with something like “Hrrdny zhak prrprrstrska czskrrty prrzhekly, OK?” Understandably, with tongues this muscular, they find English a bit fluffy. Our guide, in speaking of current problems, told us that Montenegro has a “large international death.”

In the heat of the day, we went swimming in the unearthly Adriatic. The water was so icy clear and calm that it was like flying, suspended over white limestone boulders that were 40 feet down but looked close enough to stand on. Enid wanted to know why it was so clear and I said it must be that there are no nutrients and thus no microbes clouding the water. Consequently, no food chain. This caused her to inquire, rather rudely I thought, where they got that thing with fins we had at lunch. I was standing in the shallows framing a believable reply when I felt a distinct pinch on my calf, and then another and another. Apparently there was a food chain, after all, beginning with tourist legs. Eek, went Enid, what’s biting me? “Get out,” I cried. “We’re being attacked by man-nibbling fish! ” She flopped to shore and got safely under an umbrella while I stayed to distract them. Peering into the water I could barely make out ocean-going guppies circling around and occasionally darting in for another futile nab. When it became clear that it would take at least three years for these hopeful characters to bring me down, I left them to their dreams of glory and sploshed out to my own beach chair.

Our final excursion was a day trip to Lake Skadar, which turned out to be a fairly weird place. This is the largest lake in the Balkans, around 200 square miles, but only 15 feet above the nearby sea and most of it waist deep. The exceptions are huge holes in the bottom, some going down 200 feet, out of which gushes most of the rainfall in Montenegro. The underwater fountains are actually the bottom ends of a vast and mostly unmapped network of cracks and caverns in the rain-rotted limestone of the high plateau. Crossing the high country en route, you get a view of the upper end of this drainage system: a madhouse landscape without any direction for the eye to follow, just a maze of sinkholes and collapsed caverns in the white bony rock wiith bushy eyebrows of wild pomegranate, wild fig, and scrub oak. How wonderful to behold the reality of the "karst" terrain of geology textbooks -- ah, memory lane! -- but you had to pity any Turks trying to catch Montenegrans in there.

The lake itself was completely charming.  Skadar is probably the most important wildlife refuge in Europe, in the sense that it preserves an otherwise almost extinguished Mediterranean wetlands ecology. We climbed on a nice fat shady excursion boat far up in an arm of the lake, where cliffs of deeply dissolved limestone rose straight up out of the mud and lily pads, and set off down a narrow open channel. There was not a house, a road, or any sign of human activity for mile after mile, as the valley slowly widened and water plants stretched away in glistening green acres. Everywhere were water birds - white egrets, tall blue herons, short yellow herons, hunched-up mournful storks, black-striped geese, and speedy little black bandits that turned out to be pigmy cormorants. My favorites were tiny fluffy diving ducks, minnow eaters, about the size and shape of tennis balls, which skittered like a ricochet across the water as we approached and then vanished without a ripple. The bird we didn't see was the European brown pelican, which survives only here. After about two hours of this entirely pleasant activity, we came to dock below some buildings on a bluff.  Here were signs of former glory in an abandoned hydroplane, a sort of jet fighter with pontoons, hauled up on the bank in a state of graffiti-decorated decay. Things were more lively at the lakeside restaurant where we trooped into an outdoor garden for a big lunch with wandering accordion accompaniment. The bill of fare was semi-Italian, but featured really huge hunks of fish whose pervasive bones proclaimed them as carp. Sure enough, a man carrying a plastic tub came puffing up as we lounged picking our teeth, and plopped down two of the largest carp I have ever seen, with mouths the size of toilet bowls and scales as big as saucers. No wonder those little ducks were such good skitterers.

Next day was our last, and after one more luxurious swim and another round with the ferocious man-nibblers, which made me laugh harder than ever, we switchbacked one last time up the cliff and headed for the airport in Podgorica. One final gape at the karst, one last listen to rat-a-tat Serbian in the coffee lounge, and we settled back for the sleepy transition to familiarity. The things that stay in  my mind are the amazing blue sky and amazing blue ocean, the sense of life in a quiet corner of Europe during days gone by, and the palm trees shading white marble walls and red tile roofs.