For most though there is plenty to satisfy here, and the architectural style that pervades at first would appear to be that of the Knights. But some of this is pastiche, the work of heavy-handed Italian ideologues trying to create a long forgotten chivalric era in the image of the crusaders. The Italian influence came crashing down under the marching heels of the jackboots of their erstwhile allies the Germans in 1943, an echo of the eventual capitulation of the Knights some four hundred years earlier to the Ottoman forces of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522.
The folly of that ill-conceived Italian dynasty may have restructured parts of the town in a cold, stern idealisation of what they held to be medieval, but things could have been so much worse. To the untrained eye, the flying buttressed lanes of the original city segue effortlessly into the reconstructed facsimile and, in passing, it is difficult to see the joins.