Those who wish to see heaven on Earth should come to Dubrovnik - George Bernard Shaw, 1929.
Unlike heaven, there are two ways of getting into Dubrovnik - and each presents a different face of the city. To the west, is the weighty Pile gate. Cluttered outside by taxis, bus stops and old women offering up bags of lavender or tomatoes, it nonetheless possesses a curious air of solemnity. The thick city walls which run uninterrupted from the small harbour right back round to the sea, bristle with towers and bastions.
Inside, Dubrovnik is the picture of normality. The Onofrio fountain - a solid, domed circular structure with 10 small gargoyles bursting out of its sides, spouting water - lies straight ahead. Local women sit around it, sometimes bargaining with stray tourists over the price of a room for the night, while Italian families lounge around and drink from bottles of mineral water, taking numerous photos.
Not so many people enter the city for the first time through the Ploce gate on the other side of the city - it is equally impressive, but not as near to the new port or the airport buses. Even from first glance it is militaristic, possessing a heavy medieval drawbridge and portcullis, and once inside, there is disturbing evidence of more recent violence.
One side of the winding street is formed by the Dominican monastery, a typical creamy stone building almost obscured by scaffolding. In the middle of the steel poles that cluster round the massive front door there is a stone statue of St Blaise, the patron saint of the city. One hand has been blown clean off, leaving him with a curiously bemused and pleading air.
On the wall beside the monastery, there is a large steel map of the city. It is splattered with an array of symbols - a red circle means a direct hit on a site of historic interest, a red triangle shows a destroyed roof, a black circle indicates a shelled pavement. The whole map is almost obliterated by the tiny symbols.
Dubrovnik is a town well used to invasions and wars. Since its founding in the seventh century, many powers have clashed here - the Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Venetians, the Ottoman empire, the Hapsburg Empire and even Napoleon's empire have all attempted incursions - some successful, others not.
Between the 11th and 17th century the thick city walls were built, making the city all but impenetrable except by sea. Until recently, that is.
In just 24 hours of siege in December 1991, the Serb forces rained down over 600 shells on Dubrovnik, obliterating at least two-thirds of the picturesque terracotta roofs, gutting nine palaces, destroying more than 500 historic buildings and killing hundreds. Ironically, the Serb army was settled in the hills which, for so long, had swaddled and protected the city in less militaristically advanced days, but provided the perfect shooting range for those with mortars and shells.
The many fountains in Dubrovnik, such as the Onofrio fountain, tell another part of the city's history. In the scorching Mediterranean heat, water is a luxury, something to be prized rather than used as an extravagant decoration and Dubrovnik's fountains are a symbol of the town's prosperity.
The mines in the surrounding area were rich with a particularly precious form of silver called glama, an alloy of silver and gold.
Profits from silver and other maritime trade were used to build a hugely complex water system that carried fresh water from a distant spring into the town, supplying the many households and of course, the showy fountains.
Rich Dubrovnik has long been one of the jewels of the Adriatic. It boasts architecture, stone carvings and columnaded courtyards to rival Venice, and a kind of continuity with the past that is becoming rarer as former golden cities are built on, updated and overrun with tourists.
Dubrovnik is certainly not over-run with tourists. Before the war in the former Yugoslavia, it was a booming holiday town, full of day-trippers and culture vultures. Due to the good sense of the city, tourists didn't make too many inroads into the fabric of the city itself; even on the main thoroughfare, the Stradun, shop-signs and advertisements are forbidden, and cars and tour buses are left firmly outside the city walls.
However, a lingering fear of anywhere known as a former war zone, together with a widely held belief that the whole of Croatia must lie in ruins, has kept many of the tourists away. Given that much of the revenue of Croatia's large stretch of coast was generated by tourism, it's a serious problem and infuriatingly for the Croats, it's a problem with no foundations.
Dubrovnik has been on UNESCO's list of world heritage monuments since 1979 and on the endangered list of world heritage since 1991. Although this didn't stop the original destruction of the city, it has meant that the restoration work has been well-funded, speedy and most importantly, authentic.
International restoration experts were brought in to save what could be saved and to re-build what could not, and Dubrovnik now represents one of the world's most extensive restoration projects.
One of UNESCO's provisos is that original materials must be used in the restoration where possible, an easy enough condition to fulfil in Dubrovnik. The magnificent creamy-white stone, which was used to build the city (and was also used in the construction of Venice and Vienna) can still be quarried in the many islands along the coast of Croatia and the kupe kanalice, the distinctive roofing slates have never ceased to be manufactured.
The end result of this attention to detail is that, whatever gate you choose for your arrival in Dubrovnik, it is difficult to believe that the city was so thoroughly demolished only seven years ago. Bullet holes still flower unexpectedly on the walls of houses, clustered ominously close to windows, but these pock-marks aside, the city looks completely intact. Nor is it a Disney-like shell; the work has been thorough and apart from the missing patina of age, Dubrovnik is pretty much as stunning as it always has been, inside and out.
However, any visitor to the city should walk around the two-kilometre walls. The views stretch right down the coast, far out to sea to the wooded island of Lokrum, but the most sobering sight is the extent of the restoration work, and the extensive damage to the city. Like a patchwork quilt formed out of old and new pieces of cloth, you can see for the first time how great was the number of damaged roofs, now a fresh bright terracotta against the faded, mottled old tiles.
The human damage and restoration is not so immediately obvious. We arrived in Dubrovnik in early August, looking for a place to stay. There are few cheap hotels in Croatia, and tourists who don't want to go down the package tour route either stay in rather expensive hotels such as the Hotel Argentina or Villa Dubrovnik or put up in rooms in private houses.
The latter is a rather random system that has its own rewards. As we sat by the Onofrio fountain, a charming woman called Marija came up and offered us a "Very nice room. With shower".
As we walked with her, she gabbled about the weather, which was the hottest in 50 years, the necessity of drinking water very slowly, and then without blinking, about the siege. "For five months, nothing to eat or drink. The bombs came in through the roofs and killed people in their beds. Me too, they came in through my roof." She told us that her husband had been killed fighting just outside the walls and her son had been killed by a sniper on a street near the house.
On one occasion during the five month siege she left her bedroom to go to the bathroom. When she returned 10 minutes later the roof of the house had come in, completely crushing her bed. Of her family, there was only Marija left in Dubrovnik and she survived by taking in tourists and putting them up in the rooms that used to be her family home.
From one wall of our big green-papered room, President Tudjman peered out of his official portrait, from the other, an old black and white portrait of Marija and her family gazed into space. Music floated in from the music school next door and the view music school next door and the view from the window extended right up the city, beyond the walls to the mountains beyond.
"It's good you tourists have come", Marija said once and it was echoed by others throughout our stay. The irony is that it's no great penance, as tourists from Italy and Germany have already discovered.
They are already beginning to flock back to Dubrovnik, not to gawk at battered buildings or express solidarity with the people, but to enjoy a great and varied city. There's no shortage of museums and churches to visit, from the old intact pharmacy and gold relics in the Franciscan monastery, to the salons of the Rector's Palace, and the cathedral with its altarpiece by Titian.
Dubrovnik also boasts the oldest Sephardic synagogue in Europe, an intriguing little place up flights of stairs on one of the many side streets off the Stradun. Then, of course, there is the promenade down the Stradun itself, its white paving flags so polished by footsteps over the years that they are like a gleaming ice rink, throwing back the sunlight.
Evenings are spent over long meals of grilled fish and sea food in restaurants such as the Jadran, with its perfect courtyard, or the Terasse, that bellies out over the alleyway just behind the cathedral.
After one lazy morning drinking coffee and strolling round the side streets, I decided to find a place to swim. There is a municipal beach just outside the Ploce gate or the more secluded private bathing places attached to the Hotel Argentina, but I was determined to find a spot I had spied from the walls.
Following handwritten signs that read "Cold Drinks and A Beautiful View This Way", I eventually found a gate through the ramparts off Od Margarite. The cliffs tumbled away beneath me, with just a set of narrow steps leading down to the bright blue water. Perched on the cliff side was a makeshift cafe where locals and ne'er-do-wells spent their days drinking grappa and gazing at the view.
"Dubrovnik is a beautiful city, my city" the teary-eyed proprietor murmured at me across the table, "And the only good thing about all this trouble is that now we are getting the kind of visitors we deserve. Ones who really want to come here and see this beautiful city."
Later, as I sat in the Panorama restaurant, gazing out over the rambling, compact city through binoculars kindly provided by Elvis, the waiter, it occurred to me that the inverse is true. Only now, before the tourism builds to its inevitable heights does the visitor get the full experience of Dubrovnik that it so thoroughly deserves.