Corfu Town, where Venice met Greece

The town stands on a small peninsula on the east coast, with two hills that the Byzantines called koryphoi, the peaks, from which the island took its Greek name, Kerkyra. People have lived here since ancient times. The ruins of the old Corinthian city lie to the south at Palaiopolis, and on the hill there are traces of temples. The rest of what you see today was built much later.

Corfu belonged to Venice from 1386 to 1797, and never to the Ottomans, who besieged the town in 1537 and again in 1716 and failed both times. That is why the Old Town is so Venetian. The Venetians built the Old and New Fortresses and cut the moat, the Contrafossa, to defend the city, and the houses climbed higher and higher inside the walls. This is why the lanes are narrow, the buildings are six or seven storeys tall and the washing hangs high above your head.

In 1797 the French arrived and, after a short period of Russian and Ottoman protection, came back in 1807. They left the arcade of the Liston, modelled on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and the elegant garden of the Spianada. Then the British ruled the Ionian Islands as a protectorate from 1815 to 1864. They gave the town its Palace of St Michael and St George, its cricket pitch, and a taste for ginger beer, which is still brewed on Corfu under the name tsitsibira.

The island joined Greece in 1864. Between those years Corfu produced the first governor of independent Greece, Ioannis Kapodistrias, born here in 1776. In 1921, Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh, was born at the villa of Mon Repos, just south of the town. The Old Town was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2007, for its mix of fortifications and the layers of Italian, French and British architecture.

Today the heart of the town beats around the church of Saint Spyridon, whose silver casket holds the relics of the island's patron saint. He is believed to have saved Corfu from famine, plague and siege, and four times a year, at Palm Sunday, Holy Saturday, in August and in November, his relics are carried through the streets in a procession with the town's brass bands. On Holy Saturday, people throw clay pots from their windows, to break out the old and welcome the new.