Island
Insula Rhodos
Rhodos
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Insula Rhodos is marked by its name alone, without a picture, among the islands of the Mediterranean; it is Rhodes in Greece. The Roman writer Pliny called it sacred to the sun and claimed no day passed there without sunshine. Its city, built like an amphitheatre with two harbours, was famed for shipbuilding, for the Laocoön sculpture group and for the bronze Colossus dedicated to the sun, one of the seven wonders, which stood only about seventy-six years before an earthquake brought it down. Vespasian took away the islanders' freedom, and under Constantine Rhodes became capital of the Province of the Islands.