Four centuries of Venice, plus French and British rule, left Corfu with an art history unlike anywhere else in Greece: Cretan-School icon painters, arcaded streets, opera houses and brass bands. Three days inside the island's studios, galleries and rehearsal rooms.
Greece's only museum devoted entirely to Asian art, in the 1819 Georgian palace built for the British Lord High Commissioner. Some 15,000 objects from Grigorios Manos's collection: Edo woodblock prints, Gandhara Buddhas, Noh masks. Open 08:30–15:30.
In the palace's east wing, the island's own painting canon: Charalambos Pachis, Angelos Giallinas's watercolours of the Ionian coast, and Ionian School religious works that broke from Byzantine flatness under Venetian influence. Small, well-hung, rarely crowded.
A 15th-century single-aisle basilica with a painted wooden ceiling, now holding some 90 icons from the 15th–19th centuries. The Cretan School masters who fled here after 1669 are the reason Corfiot painting looks Italian and Orthodox at once.
The oldest quarter of the town, six-storey Venetian houses over kantounia barely two metres wide. Downhill lies the Evraiki, where the 17th-century Scuola Greca on Velissariou is the only one of Corfu's four synagogues still standing.
Reopened in 2018 after a long refit, built around the Gorgon pediment from the Temple of Artemis (c. 580 BC) — the largest surviving piece of Archaic Greek sculpture in stone. The Lion of Menekrates shares the main hall.
Founded 1840 and the oldest music school in Greece, with a museum of uniforms, scores and instruments upstairs. Its band trains hundreds of children a year — the reason a 100,000-person island fields three full symphonic wind orchestras.
Above the bank on Iroon Kypriakou Agona: the complete run of modern Greek paper money, starting with the Ionian Bank's own 1839 notes issued when Corfu was a British protectorate with its own currency. Engraving plates and printing proofs included.
The successor to the Teatro San Giacomo, where Italian opera was staged from 1733 and Greek-language opera premiered in the 19th century. The modern hall on Mantzarou runs opera, chamber concerts and the Corfu Festival programme.
The 1831 neoclassical villa of the British Commissioner, later a Greek royal residence and birthplace of Prince Philip. Now a museum of the ancient city of Palaiopolis, set in a wooded estate with the Temple of Kardaki on the slope below.
A one-room archive of 1916, when the Serbian army and government-in-exile retreated to Corfu after crossing Albania. Uniforms, field-hospital instruments and photographs of Vido island, where the dead were buried at sea.
A restored 19th-century Corfiot noble townhouse where animatronic figures of the count, his family and their servants move through the rooms. Guided in English, with period furniture, kitchen and the smells staged to match each floor.
Founded 1836 and the oldest cultural institution in modern Greece, with a reading room of Ionian-era books, engravings, maps and newspapers overlooking the sea beside the palace. Members still work at the long tables.