The islands that argue over Marco Polo

Somewhere on Korčula, tour guides will point out a plain stone tower and tell you it was the birthplace of Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant whose account of his travels to the court of Kublai Khan became one of the most influential travel narratives in European history. The claim has been repeated for long enough, and marketed confidently enough, that a great many visitors leave believing it settled. It is not. No contemporary document places Polo's birth on Korčula rather than Venice, the traditionally assumed birthplace, and the theory rests largely on the coincidence that a family named Depolo lived on the island for generations and on Korčula's genuine, well-documented role in a 1298 naval battle in which Polo is recorded as having been captured by Genoese forces, fighting on the Venetian side, somewhere in these waters.

Whether or not the connection holds up, the fact that Korčula can plausibly host the argument at all says something about the island's real standing in this part of the Adriatic. Its walled old town, laid out on a herringbone street pattern designed to funnel cooling sea breezes through the centre while blocking the worst of the wind, predates the Marco Polo legend by centuries and needs no invented celebrity to justify a visit.

Hvar, the sunniest island with the receipts to prove it

A short ferry hop away, Hvar makes a rather more measurable claim: meteorological records kept over more than a century put it among the sunniest spots in the Adriatic, an advantage its lavender fields, vineyards and the grand loggia of its main square have made the most of since long before sunshine hours were formally recorded at all. Hvar Town's fortress, built up over Venetian centuries to watch for exactly the kind of pirate and Ottoman raids that made island life here a serious business, still looks down over the harbour where day-trip boats now outnumber the galleys it was built to spot.

Brač, and the stone that built more than one city

Brač, the largest island in this stretch of the central Dalmatian archipelago, has quietly furnished the material for buildings considerably more famous than anything on the island itself. The pale limestone quarried near the village of Pučišća has been used, according to long-standing local tradition, in Diocletian's palace at Split just across the water, and is widely believed to have been supplied, alongside stone from several other sources, for the construction of the White House in Washington, a claim repeated often enough in the tourist literature that it has become part of the island's identity even where the documentary trail is less than complete. Zlatni Rat, the shifting shingle spit at Bol that is the island's best-known beach, changes shape slightly with the currents each season, a natural feature no marketing department had to embellish at all.

The stonemasons' school at Pučišća still trains new generations in the same techniques used on the quarries that supplied Diocletian's builders, one of relatively few places in Europe where the craft has been kept alive as a living trade rather than preserved purely as a historical curiosity. Inland, away from the beaches, Brač's high plateau is given over to olive groves and vineyards, and the isolated Blaca Hermitage, a monastery cut into a remote gorge and reachable only on foot or by a long drive, gives some sense of how thoroughly these islands were once cut off from each other and from the mainland, long before ferries made the crossing a matter of an hour or two.

Island hopping this stretch of the coast works best between May and October, when ferry schedules run at their fullest; outside that window, services thin considerably and a fixed itinerary becomes the safer plan.