Maybe it was a nervous reaction, but the traditional Korculan “Moreska” sword dance was making me laugh.

Thirty hot, sweaty men whacking swords together above their heads, across their bodies, and below their knees with meticulous timing. Clash! Thwack! And ha-ha! Look at the sparks flying, just centimetres away from the spectators!

I think it was at the point when I leant over to my husband to whisper something thoughtful about how other countries don’t get nearly so hung up about health and safety that one of the sword blades flew off its handle, twirled vigorously through the air and landed in the mini-skirted lap of a young Croat sitting in the second row.

There was a gasp — from the audience, from her and from her friends, a group of overdressed beauties whose presence had been distracting the dancers from the start.

The Moreska continued on to its noisy climax, in which the White King wins back his woman from the Black King. Crash! Bash! The poor girl got an apology at the end. I simply marvelled that the sword hadn’t taken out an eye or lopped off an ear.

Afterwards Toni, the concierge at our hotel, whose arms sport their own criss-cross pattern of scars from years of dancing Moreska, explained that the dance, once common across southern Europe, was now confined to Korcula, the sixth-biggest island in the Adriatic.

It was hard to get replacement swords, he said — and he should know, having once travelled all the way to Kosovo to find new blades for his troupe.

There is no doubt that the dance has an enthusiastic following that goes beyond entertaining tourists. This turned out to be a common theme on Korcula — you couldn’t help but think that if the tourists disappeared (as most did during the Croatian war of independence in the early 1990s) not a lot would change.

Visitors eat and drink as the locals do. That wasn’t a problem since the locally produced food is delicious. I had one of the tastiest meals of my life at a ramshackle restaurant called Mate in the village of Pupnat. There were olives, marinated aubergines, mild feta, curd cheese with pears and honey, and a wild asparagus omelette.

Home-made macaroni followed, one dish served with almond pesto, the other with a fennel sauce. There was sage ravioli, too. The joke in Korcula is that the elderly women who make the macaroni roll it into shape on their thighs.

Mate’s chef, whose thighs were to be reckoned with, sat behind us throughout lunch with a deadpan expression. Repeated praise and protestations of how good it all was provoked the occasional nod. Lunch ended with chocolate cake, a hard sugary doughnut and a dish of rosemary sorbet.

The restaurant could probably claim a one-mile catchment area for all its produce. The herbs that flavoured the pasta and the home-made grappa sprouted up the side of the terrace and all over the garden.

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