Antwerp's cathedral tower is visible from almost anywhere in the city, and for good reason. The spire of the Cathedral of Our Lady rises about 123 metres above the old town, a slender, lacy Gothic needle that Napoleon is said to have compared with Mechelen lace. Work began in the middle of the fourteenth century and dragged on until the early sixteenth, by which time the city was the richest port in Northern Europe. The builders planned two towers but only finished one, and the unfinished stump of the second gives the facade its lopsided look.
Inside, the church is wide and airy, with seven aisles and a forest of slender columns, and it holds some of the greatest paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, including the Descent from the Cross and the Elevation of the Cross, which he painted in the early seventeenth century for this very building. Rubens lived and worked in Antwerp, and his house, a short walk away, is open to visitors. The walls are covered in the work of later painters too, and the cathedral's vast interior is cooler and quieter than the square outside.
The cathedral stands in the old town, near the Grote Markt, with its guild houses and the fountain of Brabo, the legendary soldier who threw a giant's hand into the river Scheldt, which gave the city its name, according to a folk etymology, from hand werpen, to throw a hand. The streets around are cobbled, narrow and busy with pedestrians and trams, and the area is a low-emission zone, so riders should check the rules and plan to park in a garage on the edge. On a motorbike, Antwerp's ring roads are fast, heavy with lorries from the port, and often congested, with the Kennedy tunnel under the Scheldt a famous bottleneck.
Antwerp is a large city of nearly half a million people, so fuel, food and everything else is easy. Wander the lanes at dusk, when the cathedral is lit and the cafes fill with people. Belgian beer, mussels and frites are all good here, and the local speciality, the Antwerpse handjes, are biscuits shaped like a hand. The diamond district near the central station is one of the world's main centres for the trade, and the station itself is a spectacular building worth a look.