Every civilization that has touched Corfu left something behind rather than erasing what came before it. Four centuries of Venetian rule produced a walled old town and an Adriatic architectural register; the British protectorate added neoclassical buildings and a cricket pitch still maintained on the Spianada; underneath both, an older Greek substrate persists quietly.
The northeast coast, where the water is clearest, remains the least disturbed by any of the island's successive administrations. A Habsburg empress's fantasy of classical Greece, built on Venetian ground and reached by British-improved roads, compresses the island's central idea into a single building. Corfu does not resolve into one identity. It is several, simultaneously.
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