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Day 28: The Palace of the Grand Masters, in Rhodes’ old town, blew our tiny little minds. Built as a castle at a prime hilltop position at the end of Rhodes’ Avenue of the Knights, it was as much a castle as it was a palace. Initially built in the 14th century, the palace was destroyed by fire in 1856 and rebuilt by the Italians who were then the occupying power in Rhodes (over the years, everyone has had their turn: the Romans, the Turks, the Italians, the Germans, and now the Greeks).

Room after room of grand staircases, beautiful early mosaics taken from the nearby Dodecanese island of Kos, views back over the Old Town and sympathetic lighting made the palace a wondrous place to walk through. It was the sort of place where you could lose yourself imagining yourself centuries ago taking part in the affairs of the day.

There was also an excellent, well-curated museum which contained some of the archeological finds from early Rhodes and a moving temporary exhibition chronicling the displacement and extermination of the Greek Jewish people by the Nazis during the second world war.