Rhodes Old Town: in through the right gate, out after dark

Rhodes Town

1. 8:15 am1

   Mandraki and the deer columns before the ships tie upRhodes Town

   The two cruise berths are working by 09:00 and several thousand people walk into the old town in the hour after. This half hour outside the walls is the buffer that makes the rest of the morning possible — and the windmills on the mole are better lit early anyway.

2. 9:05 am2

   In through d'Amboise Gate, not Freedom GateRhodes Town

   This is the whole trick of the day. The north-west gates put you straight at the top of the Street of the Knights beside the palace, so you walk the medieval spine downhill and empty. Everyone arriving off a ship enters at the bottom and walks up it into you.

3. 9:35 am3

   Palace of the Grand Master at openingRhodes Town

   Two things almost nobody uses: the mosaic floors upstairs were lifted from Kos and shipped here in the 1930s, and the two ground-floor exhibitions on medieval and ancient Rhodes are included in the same ticket and are usually empty. Budget the extra hour for them rather than a second museum.

4. 11:40 am4

   Street of the Knights downhill to the Archaeological MuseumRhodes Town

   Each inn on the street belonged to a different 'tongue' of the order and carries its coat of arms — France is the ornate one, Spain the plain one. The museum at the bottom is the Knights' hospital itself and the courtyard is worth the ticket on its own; the small Aphrodite everyone comes for is in a side room and is about the size of a cat.

5. 1:15 pm5

   Long lunch at NireasRhodes Town

   Tables out under the bougainvillea on a lane wide enough for two chairs. Ask what came in that morning instead of ordering from the printed fish list — the list is the same all season and the answer is not.

6. 3 pm6

   Kahal Shalom and the Square of the Jewish MartyrsRhodes Town

   The oldest synagogue still standing in Greece, with a small and very sobering museum behind it about the 1944 deportation of the island's community. The seahorse-fountain square outside is the quietest corner inside the walls in mid-afternoon. Closed Saturdays.

7. 5 pm7

   Walk the dry moat, the whole way roundRhodes Town

   Free, flat, dry, and about two and a half kilometres of grass and stacked cannonballs beneath the walls. Drop in near Koskinou Gate. It is the only serious length of the fortifications you can walk without the ticketed rampart tour, and almost nobody does it.

8. 8 pm8

   Dinner in the Marco Polo Mansion courtyardRhodes Town

   A fifteenth-century mansion in the old Turkish quarter that opens only in the evening; the courtyard holds about a dozen tables and they go a week ahead in season, so email rather than turning up. Ask for directions to the hotel entrance when you book — the lane door is unmarked and the alley is genuinely hard to find after dark.