About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Continuous Integration in .NET is captioned “Bride from Sinj in Dalmatia, Croatia.” The illustration is taken from a reproduction of an album of Croatian traditional costumes from the mid-nineteenth century by Nikola Arsenovic, published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2003. The illustrations were obtained from a helpful librarian at the Ethnographic Museum in Split, itself situated in the Roman core of the medieval center of the town: the ruins of Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace from around AD 304. The book includes finely colored illustrations of figures from different regions of Croatia, accompanied by descriptions of the costumes and of everyday life.

Sinj is a small town in the center of an area in Dalmatia known as Cetinska krajina, a group of settlements situated on a fertile plain through which the river Cetnia passes. Sinj lies between four mountains which give the area its specific sub-Mediterranean climate. The town grew around an ancient fortress (held by the Ottomans from the sixteenth century until the end of seventeenth century) and a Franciscan monastery with the church of Our Lady of Sinj, a place of pilgrimage.