V NONA Nona, Nova, Non, Nin, Aenona Civitas, lies about seventeen kilometres due north of Zara; it can easily be reached in the excellent Fiat car of Antonio Mestrovic—to be heard of at the Hotel Bristol, the handsome house on the new esplanade looking across the canal of Zara to Ugliano and the Fort of S. Michele—in less than three-quarters of an hour. Nona is the most northern town of the Dalmatian mainland, if town it can be called, for, though once a flourishing Roman colony and later on an important Croat centre, seat of a ^vipan and a bishop, and the occasional residence °i kings, it is now hardly a hamlet, having been educed to this forlorn condition by malaria engendered in the surrounding swamps. The beginning of its end dates from the fourteenth century, when, to save itself from the tyranny of 45