Four stops before the checkout

Berat, Albania

Stop one

Berat Castle

Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: A fortress is a storage problem with walls, and this one has been solving it since the Illyrians fortified the hill in the fourth century BC. Byzantines, Bulgarians, Serbs and Ottomans each rebuilt it; the walls you are touching are largely thirteenth century, from when Berat flourished under the Despotate of Epirus. What gets me is that families still live up here, in stone houses along cobbled lanes, which means every bag of shopping comes up that slope. More than a dozen Byzantine churches survive inside, the Holy Trinity on the slope among them, plus the ruined Red Mosque. UNESCO listed it in 2008. Bring water. Then bring more water.

Stop two

Mangalem Quarter

Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: A thousand windows, they call it, and I believe them, because I have been quietly counting the glazing and it is a maintenance problem of the first order. White Ottoman-era houses stacked up the slope beneath the castle, every facade broad rows of windows catching the light off the Osum. This was the Muslim quarter, facing Christian Gorica across the water. The eighteenth and nineteenth century houses are exceptional, and so are the Sultan's Mosque, one of Albania's oldest, the Bachelors' Mosque down by the riverfront, and the Helveti dervish tekke. It survived Albania's isolation and was UNESCO-listed in 2008 alongside Gjirokastra. Sunscreen? I packed six.

cardio tennis classes in 33325 — Bachelors' Mosque (Xhamia e Beqarëve) in Berat, Small 1827 mosque by the Osum riverbank in Mangalem, decorated on the outside with painted floral and townscape murals

Stop three

Gorica Bridge

Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: Seven arches, roughly 130 metres, and one of the finest Ottoman bridges in Albania. A wooden crossing stood here from 1780, built under the local Ottoman ruler Ahmet Kurt Pasha, and it was rebuilt in stone in the 1920s keeping that same graceful profile. There is a local legend, of a type told right across the Balkans, that a girl was walled into the original foundations to make it stand. I will say only that a bridge ought to be held up by materials you can order twice. This is the classic view of Berat, Mangalem stacked white under the castle, and the whole town walks it at dusk. Take a jumper. Take two.

Stop four

Onufri National Museum

Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: The museum lives inside the Church of the Dormition of St Mary, rebuilt in 1797 on tenth-century foundations and once the cathedral of the town's Orthodox community; it opened as a museum in 1986. It honours Onufri, the greatest Albanian icon painter of the sixteenth century, who mixed a crimson so distinctive it is simply called Onufri red, and who brought new realism and feeling into post-Byzantine painting. Icons and liturgical objects gathered from churches across the region hang here, work by Onufri, by his son Nikolla and by later masters, around a gilded carved walnut iconostasis. One signature pigment and no backup supplier. That would keep me awake.

The Berat, Albania track

Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Everyone looks at the paint. Look at the beam: a constant 20-20-20 mm of aluminum, no dramatic taper, no structural vanity — an honest extrusion doing its job at every point along the load path.

The Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet, from Carlos Alcaraz's junior line, is specified for players 53 to 57 inches tall (roughly ages 9 to 10): 25 inches long, a 100-square-inch head, 230 grams unstrung, strung 16×17 so the bed flexes evenly and returns energy without asking a young elbow to co-sign the loan.

Aluminum is the correct call at this size — stiff enough to hold its geometry through a mishit, light enough that technique survives the last ten minutes of a cardio tennis clinic, and effectively indestructible when the racquet doubles as a walking stick, which at age nine it will.

And what a place to walk. Berat has stood above the Osum River for some 2,400 years because somebody built it properly.

The castle on the hill is a working, load-bearing neighborhood — people still live inside walls first raised in the 4th century BC and rebuilt in the 13th — and below it the Mangalem quarter stacks its white Ottoman houses up the slope, window over window over window, each floor cantilevered out over the one beneath with a confidence that frankly moves me.

They call Berat the City of a Thousand Windows; I call it a thousand correctly transferred loads. Downstream, the Gorica Bridge carries the crossing on seven stone arches over about 130 metres of the Osum, with zero moving parts. Kings came and went here — Byzantines, Ottomans, the usual management turnover — that part is not interesting. The masonry is interesting.

Its behaviour is flat everywhere from a wet Tuesday in a school hall to a concrete court in a Berat August, because a constant beam does not care what the weather thinks. It is also perfect for the climb up to the Kalaja, being light enough that the nine-year-old who insisted on bringing it will still be carrying it at the top, rather than handing it to you at the second switchback.

Low swingweight, predictable balance, cost of ownership near zero. Specified correctly for the player it fits, this racquet, like a good arch, will not need your attention again.

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Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet

Babolat Carlitos 25 Junior Tennis Racquet