Sightseeing in Rhodes

Rhodes Town is the largest medieval city in Europe that people still live in. Four kilometres of walls, raised by the Knights Hospitaller in the fifteenth century, enclose quarters where ordinary life goes on behind the gates: laundry on lines, cats, shops. The main axis is the Street of the Knights, six hundred metres of almost untouched Gothic, lined with the inns of the order's national tongues, each with its own coat of arms. At the top the street ends at the Palace of the Grand Master, rebuilt by the Italians in the 1930s; lower down, the knights' hospital houses the Archaeological Museum.

The layers here sit directly on one another. The Ottomans, who took the city in 1522 after a six-month siege, left the Suleiman mosque and the clock tower, from which the whole roofscape is visible at once. The Jewish quarter carries something later still — the Square of the Martyrs commemorates the deportation of 1944. All of it can be walked, and a guided tour of the town usually takes two or three unhurried hours.

Outside the walls lies Mandraki, the harbour with three windmills on the mole and the fort of Saint Nicholas; the columns at the entrance carry deer rather than the Colossus, though legend usually puts it exactly here. Beyond that begins the new town with its Italian architecture of the 1920s. And almost everything to do with the island departs from here: the ferry to Symi, the coaches to the Valley of the Butterflies, the jeeps into the mountains and the boats along the east coast.