CORFU IS GREEN AND LEAFY, SO much so that it seems as if every inch of the island is covered with trees.
Even when your eye becomes accustomed to the landscape, you cannot stop reeling at the sheer number of trees, particularly the olives. There doesn't seem be any bare land, open spaces or fields. In 1623, the Venetians, who occupied the Corfu island for four centuries from 1386 to 1797, offered the Corfiots financial incentives to plant olive trees and to replace wild ones with cultivated ones. Within 100 years there were more than two million: and this number has continued increasing so that today Corfu is one huge olive grove. The trees are rarely pruned, so they look quite different from those in the rest of Greece, being much taller and wilder, there are also lemon trees, orange trees, oaks, elms and tall Italian cypresses, which give the landscape a distinctive, haunting, un-Greek quality (to those of us accustomed to the stark Cyclades), as well as Judas trees with their spectacular purple flowers in spring.

Corfu, despite the olives, doesn't seem all that Greek (and a couple of years ago the BBC reported the existence of a small movement for autonomy, the basis for which was that all the revenue from taxes raised on the island by central government in Athens was being spent on the mainland); or maybe my visit just reminded me of the diversity of Greece. Certainly Corfu Town, with its broad streets, splendid monuments, esoteric museums, fashionable shops and pavement cafés often seemed as grand and cosmopolitan as Paris or Rome.

The Corfu Old Town, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, is a labyrinth of narrow streets paved with cobblestones and packed with tourist shops all selling pretty much the same things: wooden toys, soaps, olive-wood carvings and embroidered fabrics. One of the products on offer is a sickly-sweet liqueur made from kumquats; the little Chinese oranges are grown locally, having been introduced — presumably by the British — from East Asia in the 1860s. These cobbled streets are known as the kantounia, and some of the older ones follow the gentle, stumble-inducing irregularities of the ground; many are too narrow for cars and lorries. A promenade rises by the seashore towards Garitsa Bay, together with an esplanade known as the Spianada, between the town and the old Venetian citadel. On the western side of the Spianada lies the Liston, an arcade of shops and cafés modeled on the rue de Rivoli in Paris and designed in 1807 by the French engineer Mathieu de Lesseps (whose son built the Suez Canal). Facing it is the former cricket ground, a British legacy, where cricket was first played on St George's Day in 1823 between the British Garrison and the Royal Navy; nowadays most matches are played at a new ground at Kontokali marina as much of this area is now used for parking. Nearby is the Museum of Asian Art, where more than 10,000 artefacts, donated by Gregorios Manos in 1927, are housed in a building which originally belonged to the British Protectorate. It was designed by the British architect Sir George Whitmore in 1818 as the residence of the Lord High Commissioner and was also used as the headquarters of the Order of the Knights of St Michael and St George. The British have loved Corfu for centuries. After all, the Duke of Edinburgh was born here, at Mon Repos, a stately home built in 1824 for the British High Commissioner, Sir Frederick Adam; and according to a number of sources, including Lawrence Durrell who lived here in the 1930s, Prospero's island in The Tempest is modelled on Shakespeare's idea of Corfu. In the 19th century, Edward Lear spent several winters on the island. Lear's first visit to Corfu was in 1848, and the island seems to have captured his imagination from the start. He was there during the final years of the British Protectorate, which ended in 1864 when the Ionian Islands were ceded to Greece; and the letters and journals he wrote on Corfu are a sharply perceptive and poignant record of island life. Collected in the book The Corfu Years, they present.