The Palace of the Grand Master and the Archaeological Museum (Hospital of the Knights)

At the top and bottom of the Street of the Knights stand the two grandest monuments built by the Knights Hospitaller in Rhodes: the fortress-palace of the Grand Master at the highest point of the old acropolis, and the monumental Great Hospital of the Knights at the harbour end, housing the island's Archaeological Museum. (Buy the standard fare Combined Ticket at either entrance to cover both).

1. The Palace of the Grand Master

Originally erected in the late 7th century as a Byzantine citadel and rebuilt in the 1340s by Grand Master Hélion de Villeneuve as the administrative headquarters of the Order of St John, the palace survived the 1522 Ottoman siege intact, only to have its lower floor devastated in 1856 when lightning struck a forgotten cache of Ottoman gunpowder stored in the basement of the adjacent Church of St John. Between 1937 and 1940, Italian architect Vittorio Mesturino reconstructed the palace in monumental Gothic-Art Deco splendour:

• The 24 Halls of Ancient Kos Mosaics (Upper Floor): the Italian restorers paved every single reception hall on the upper piano nobile with authentic late-Hellenistic and Roman floor mosaics lifted from villas and churches on the neighbouring island of Kos, including the famous Mosaic of the Nine Muses, the Medusa Mosaic, and the Europa and the Bull floor.
• The Laocoön Cast & Ground-Floor Medieval Exhibitions: stand before the scale cast of the famous Laocoön and His Sons sculpture, then tour the ground-floor vaults chronicling 2,400 years of Rhodian history.

2. The Archaeological Museum of Rhodes

At the bottom of the Street of the Knights, step through a pointed Gothic portal into a sweeping two-storey stone courtyard where a marble lion sits over a mosaic floor surrounded by stone trebuchet balls from the 1480 and 1522 sieges. Upstairs in the vast vaulted Great Ward of the Sick and the side rooms, do not miss two world-famous marble masterpieces:

1. The Crouching Aphrodite of Rhodes: a luminous white Parian marble sculpture of the goddess kneeling after her bath and lifting her long wavy hair in her hands to dry it in the sun.
2. The Funerary Stele of Krito and Timarista (c. 420 BC, from Kamiros) & Marble Head of Helios: a deeply moving classical relief of a mother and daughter embracing in farewell, alongside the radiant 2nd-century BC portrait head of the Sun God Helios.