bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.

A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.

This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.

Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.

From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.

Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.

Influential art

Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs formosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.

This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.

What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.

Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and