Orlando's Column

This guide to Orlando's Column in Dubrovnik follows the stone knight who has stood watch over Luza Square since fourteen eighteen, carved from a single block of limestone by a Milanese sculptor and a local craftsman working side by side. It traces his forearm, still marked with the medieval cloth-measuring unit merchants once used in this square, and the storm in eighteen twenty-five that knocked him flat for over fifty years before anyone raised him again. It also follows him through the shelling of the early nineteen-nineties, boxed behind sandbags, and to a modern repair meant to strengthen him. Each July the Libertas flag still climbs the bare mast above his head to open the Dubrovnik Summer Festival.