St. Peter's Church

This guide to St. Peter's Church in Jaffa follows Napoleon Bonaparte to the hilltop room he chose to sleep in after taking the harbor in 1799, one of two surviving chambers from a crusader citadel first raised by a Holy Roman Emperor and later rebuilt by King Louis the Ninth. It also traces the Franciscan church built over those foundations in 1654, torn down and rebuilt twice more, and its unusual westward orientation toward the sea. Stand back from the building the way sailors once did to see the facade's carved stone from Caesarea Philippi.