if not by political treatises, then by architecture.

Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.

Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.

Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.

Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?

Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?

Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection betweenthe Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.

The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.

As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.