A Split boy in the world

I’m Ščenza. Born and raised in Split, Croatia — the limestone-and-Adriatic kind of upbringing where the Roman emperor’s palace is the city centre and half the kids you went to school with are working a fishing boat by twenty. I left for a two-week software contract in 2005. I am, technically, still on my way home.

By trade I’m a software developer. That’s the day job and it’s what paid for most of the flights. The rest of it — the wiring, the boat engines, the things that need fixing in old houses — is the Dalmatian inheritance. You grow up on a coast and you learn to splice cable, change an outboard impeller, replace a fuse. Useful skills in a lot of places I have ended up.

Split is the love of my life

I tremble. Every time the plane banks over the Brač channel on the way back in, I tremble. Twenty years. A hundred-plus returns. Still trembling.

I love its soul. I love its people. The directness, the fjaka, the pomalo. The Sunday lunches that take four hours. The way Bačvice fills up at five for picigin. The fishermen at Matejuška sorting nets at dawn. The fact that the Roman emperor built his retirement palace here in 305 AD and ten thousand of us still live inside its walls. The fact that the city is small enough that you’ll see the same waiter on three different streets in the same day, and they will all know your name.

I have left a hundred times in twenty years. The longest absence was eleven months (a contract in Singapore). I came home thinner, sadder, and within an hour of landing at Resnik I was on the Riva with a coffee and the trembling had stopped. This is the only city in the world I do that for. It is, structurally, the thing this blog is measured against. Every Split lens at the end of every other piece on this site is, in a sense, an accounting of what I miss when I’m away.

If you only read one piece, read the Split guide. It’s the longest thing on the site and the only one I wrote without re-reading.

What this blog is

Twenty years of getting lost on purpose. Ninety-odd countries. The pieces here are what I wrote in cafés between contracts, on overnight buses, on the kind of mornings where you can’t sleep because the call to prayer started at four. I’m not a professional travel writer. I’m a guy from Split who kept missing his flight home.

Every piece has a short Split lens at the end — what reminded me of home in that place, and what I think Split and our people on the coast could learn from there. Some of it is half-serious; some of it is what I’d say to the mayor over a coffee on the Riva, if anyone asked.

What I try to do

Write about places the way you’d describe them to a friend who’s about to spend two weeks there: honestly, specifically, with a memory of the first time you got it wrong. I avoid superlatives. I don’t pretend I’ve been everywhere — only that the places I’ve been to, I’ve been to slowly enough to have something to say.

No affiliate links on this site. No display advertising. No popup asking for your email twelve seconds after you arrive. If you find a piece useful, the highest compliment is to tell someone about it.

How I work

I usually spend at least two weeks in a place before I write a word about it. Some essays sat in a notebook for a decade. I rely on the kindness of locals, the patience of innkeepers, and the absolute mercy of overnight train conductors. I drink the tap water more often than the doctor recommends. I have lost three cameras to the sea and one passport to a goat (Lalibela, 2011 — long story).

Practical details — visa rules, prices, restaurant recommendations — are accurate to the year they were last updated. Travel changes places quickly now. Please always confirm before you go. The essays are the point; the listings are scaffolding.

If you want to write

scenza [at] longerwayhome [dot] com. I read everything. I reply slowly. Pomalo, as we say on the coast — take it slow.

“The longer I do this, the less certain I am about almost everything except the value of a good konoba, a long lunch, and a flight you don’t need to be on tomorrow.”
— Ščenza