And then there is the pappardelle with short rib ragù: rustic homemade pasta tossed with earthy slivers of meat and strips of sun-dried tomato, and flecked with coarsely chopped garlic, fresh mint and goat cheese.
His tan-colored cat, a skinny thing lying in a strip of sun that streamed down on the verdant grass, was unaware of the deep red chicken pecking at bugs near its head.
And, with two of the country's most popular tourist hotspots, Split and Dubrovnik, linked by a 140-mile strip of sun-bleached coastline, it's also providing fertile ground for the incipient youth cruise revolution, with companies popping up all over the place seeking to tap into that hungry post-university, pre-responsibility market.
Here and there, on narrow strips of sand at the lake edge, people lay on their backs on towels in the sun.
The brown strip of sand was clotted with a sun-screened tangle of humanity.
It's not quite as glam as its heyday, but this 4km strip of sand continues to heave with sun-seekers.
Women lay out huge strips of linen to bleach in the sun in a painting by Jacob Ruisdael that astonishingly manages to show the whole landscape around Haarlem with the lofty precision of a satellite photograph.
Summer was in its fullness; on front porches, neighbors fanned themselves with folded newspapers; sprinklers sent arcs of spray onto patches of lawn and strips of driveway, which shone in the sun like black licorice; at the top of a ladder, a man in a baseball cap moved a paintbrush lazily back and forth.
Where rain is scarce and the ground is stripped of trees, where soil is eroded by the steady beat of sun, hooves, and seasonal farming, a landscape can turn to dust in a generation.
Back at base, we snacked on wild mangoes with chilli sauce, strips of deep-fried buffalo skin and sun-dried pork while watching a hot-air balloon sail over the peaks as the sun set.
"We climbed over lava formations, we went through a cave," they found a strip of sand and lay down and watched the sun go down.
