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Stop three
Archaeological Museum of Durrës
Wilson NXT Control 16g Tennis String Reel: The largest archaeological museum in Albania, sitting on the seafront promenade, and its best-known holdings are small terracotta heads and figurines made right here — here being, in strict chronological order and please do keep them in order, Epidamnos to the Greeks and later Dyrrachium to the Romans. Two names, one harbour, endlessly conflated by people who ought to know better. Now the tangent, which is in fact the whole point. This was the western doorstep of the Via Egnatia, the Roman road running from this quay clear across the peninsula to Byzantium. Read that again, slowly. Everything moving between Rome and the east — armies, grain, tax, gossip, legates in a hurry — came ashore approximately where you are standing and began walking. It was never a sleepy beach town; it was a doorway with a customs post attached. Which makes the little clay heads the souvenir trade of an imperial transit hub, and therefore, I would argue, the most honest objects in the building.
Mix matters. Everyone stares at the finish and nobody asks what is in the bucket, and the bucket is the whole job. Wilson NXT Control is a proper mix: firm polyester filaments laid in alternating bundles with soft nylon fibres, bound in a body that is roughly 43% polyurethane.
The poly gives you the control and the crisp response, the nylon and the PU give you the forgiveness on a mishit. At 16 gauge it measures 1.32 mm, which is the version most people should be buying, and this is the 200 m reel.
Durrës is the best value assessment on the Adriatic and I will not be talked out of it. In the middle of Durrës, sunk into the hillside, sits the largest Roman amphitheatre in the Balkans, built in the second century — and nobody knew it was there.
It was found in the 1960s under gardens and houses, which means people had been growing vegetables on the roof of a stadium for generations, and houses still stand on its upper rim. Somebody later installed a small Byzantine chapel with wall mosaics down in the arena, which is the ancient equivalent of subletting.
The ticket costs less than a coffee in most European capitals.
At the seaward end of the Byzantine city wall stands the Venetian Tower, squat and round, now an open-air bar with tables on top. Those walls went up after a catastrophic earthquake, funded by the Emperor Anastasius I, who happened to have been born in this very town — the ultimate hometown discount — and the Venetians bolted the fat round tower onto the end centuries later.
One drink buys you the entire Adriatic sunset from the battlements. On the promenade, the Archaeological Museum is the largest in Albania and holds shelves of small Hellenistic terracotta heads made here when this was Epidamnos and later Dyrrachium, the port at the western end of the Via Egnatia — the toll booth of an empire, not a sleepy beach town.
And on the hill above, King Zog's abandoned 1930s villa is overpriced and not even open; the view he built the whole thing for is free from the road outside.
You will string from this reel everywhere from a hard court behind the Durrës promenade to an indoor hall in Tirana, forty minutes east, and by the way, it is also perfect for a slow evening along the seafront afterwards, which costs nothing and surveys beautifully.
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