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while a prominent equestrian statue of Queen Wilhelmina marks the spot where the Rokin hits the canal system. Born in The Hague, Wilhelmina (1880–1962) came to the throne in 1890 and abdicated in favour of her daughter, Juliana, 58 years later – a mammoth royal stint by any standard. After her retirement she wrote a memoir, Lonely but not Alone, which explored her strong religious beliefs, but her popularity was based on her determined resistance to the Germans in World War II, when she was the figurehead of the government-in-exile in London. Further south, beyond the Allard Pierson museum on the other side of the canal, nos. 141–147 Oude Turfmarkt are classic seventeenth-century canal houses, graced by bottle- and spout-shaped gables.

The Old Centre | The Rokin and Kalverstraat |

The Allard Pierson Museum

Overlooking the canal, the solid Neoclassical building at Oude Turfmarkt 127 used to be the headquarters of the Dutch central bank and is now the Allard Pierson Museum (Tues–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat & Sun 1–5pm; €6.50; www.allardpiersonmuseum.nl), a good old-fashioned archeological museum spread over two floors, and labelled in Dutch and English. It’s not a large museum, but it has a wide-ranging collection of finds retrieved from Egypt, Greece and Italy. The particular highlight is the museum’s Greek pottery with fine examples of both the black- and red-figured wares produced in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Look out also for several ornate Roman sarcophagi, especially a whopper made of marble and decorated with Dionysian scenes, a very unusual wooden coffin from c.150 AD, which is partly carved in the shape of the man held within, and Etruscan funerary urns and carvings, including an amazingly precise statue of a baby in swaddling clothes. Of the Egyptian artefacts on the ground floor, a model of a ship and its crew from the Middle Kingdom stands out – another funerary object, used to transport the soul of the dead to the afterlife.

The Old Centre | The Rokin and Kalverstraat |

Hotel Doelen

The Hotel de l’Europe on Nieuwe Doelenstraat is one of the city’s most luxurious and well-appointed places to stay, although the Hotel Doelen next door is perhaps of more historic interest, incorporating as it does the Kloveniers Tower, once the headquarters and meeting place of the company Rembrandt depicted in The Night Watch. No one knows for sure whether he painted The Night Watch here, but it certainly hung in the building at one time, and if you ask nicely in reception you can stroll up to see where it was, although – despite the tour groups that regularly trundle through – there’s not much to look at beyond a crumbling red-brick wall and a bad photo of the painting.

The Old Centre | The Rokin and Kalverstraat |

Kalverstraat

Running parallel to the Rokin to the west, the pedestrianized shopping street of Kalverstraat curves north to Dam Square. The street has been a commercial centre since medieval times, when it was used as a calf market, and it was also here, in 1345, that the city witnessed the Miracle of the unburnable Host (see "The Oude Kerk"), and the street became a route for pilgrims. Kalverstraat really could be any European shopping street, but if you want to shop, and you’re not looking for designer labels, this is the place to come.

The Old Centre | The Rokin and Kalverstraat |

The Begijnhof

Just off Kalverstraat, on Gedempte Begijnensloot, the Begijnhof (daily 9am–5pm; free; www.begijnhofamsterdam.nl) consists of a huddle of immaculately maintained old houses looking onto a central green, their backs to the outside world; you can also sneak in here from the gate on the Spui. The Begijnhof was founded in the fourteenth century as a home for the Beguines – members of a Catholic sisterhood living as nuns, but without vows and with the right to return to the secular world (see "Beguinages"). The original medieval complex comprised a series of humble brick cottages, but these were mostly replaced by the larger, grander houses of today shortly after the Reformation, though the secretive, enclosed design survived.