The snail's house is destiny's embrace; in every house that embraces us there is something of this relationship with destiny. The house Skočimiš on the island of Šipan has been my envelope for almost forty years now. Its forty five square meters (on five levels) make it almost like a skin that is hard to peel off.

One evening, half a century ago, I entered the bay of Suđurađ on a boat owned by the Institute for Protection of Cultural Monuments of Dubrovnik, as part of the student team lead by Professor Milan Prelog. The sky was red from the sunset, the two Renaissance towers were piercing the redness, the double medieval church, the serrated walls of the Renaissance summer houses, the houses which outlined this temporal border of the scene up to the sixteenth century.