Cairo’s old city has long been famous for the three Cs: crowds, crumbling buildings and . . . overflowing sewers. A decade-long restoration programme, however, and extensive sewage works have made its main street fit for princes.

Founded a little over 1,001 years ago, the old city was originally the preserve of caliphs and viziers. They lived in two sprawling palaces of such beauty and splendour, the 12th-century crusader William of Tyre doubted anyone would believe his description.

The palaces disappeared long ago, but that hasn’t stopped Cairenes continuing to call the street that separated them Bayn al-Qasrayn — Between the Palaces. And along this palace walk lies a princely feast of medieval mosques, crumbling caravanserais, restored mansions and elaborate Koran schools. There’s even some good shopping to be done along the way.

History hangs around every doorway, but nowhere more than at Bab Zuweila, the grand, twin-towered southern gate. This was a popular meeting place long before crowds gathered in 1517 to watch the Turks hang the defeated Egyptian sultan.

The complete guide to modern day Cairo

Nick Redman takes in the legends of antiquity, and raises a midnight Martini to a modern city

• Cairo, the ultimate shopping city

Cairo's Egyptian Museum in a day

Daniel Jacobs, co-author of the Rough Guide to Egypt, reveals the rapid guide to Cairo's immense museum

• Egypt's other pyramids

My secret Cairo

There’s much more to the city than Pyramids and relics. Philip Hensher praises its hidden beauty

Related Internet Links

• More ideas for holidays in Egypt

Related Links

• Cairo's Egyptian Museum in a day

• The complete guide to modern day Cairo

Perhaps to counter the evil of execution, locals also believed that a holy spirit inhabited the place, and until recently they nailed teeth, rags and other offerings to the gate, hoping the saint would help to cure the ill. The relics were cleared away in a recent restoration, but, as with so much in the old city, the legend lives on.

Beware walking through this gate with a head full of stories and distracting memories, because, once inside, the city will rush at you. There was so much to look at — and so many cars, motorbikes and people pushing past — that I came away from this first stretch with nothing more coherent than a collage of images: an elaborate Ottoman fountain, a woman heading for the hammam, the soaring entrance to a medieval mosque, a cotton trader sitting on filled sacks, the last of the fez-makers brushing black tassels, and a veiled woman admiring a racy red dress.

Come on a Sunday and you will find the shops shut, the street sleepy. But I was there midweek, and had to push against the crowd to turn up the side street to Al-Azhar, one of the city’s original, AD969 buildings and still seat of its highest religious authority. In the courtyard, all was beauty and light, as orientalist painters recorded 150 years ago.

I sat for a hile watching an old imam giving instruction to young students. But it’s not just the religious who understand the appeal of a mosque in one of the world’s most densely populated cities: against the far wall, several men were stretched out not in prayer but in sleep.

Cairo was always divided according to trades or social groups — there was even a quarter for Franks, as Europeans were known. This once royal street and its souks are still arranged accordingly. First there was the perfume souk and its touts: “My uncle’s shop . . .”; “Secrets of Cleopatra . . .”; “Cheaper than in France!”).

Following my nose down a side alley, I came to the purer scents of the covered spice market and its bursting, pungent sacks of chilli, cumin, saffron and hibiscus flowers.

A few more steps along the palace walk brought me to the gold souk.

By then, I’d realised that it wasn’t the goods that appealed to me so much as the glimpse of local life. In one shop, Egyptian women were conferring over a pair of earrings: the dealer weighed and reweighed them on his scales, and carried on talking in the hope that something he said would convince them to buy. A couple of doors down, a mother picked out an armful of bracelets for her daughter’s dowry, fingering them as carefully as eggs.

Times recommends

• Travel advice: what to do if your flight is disrupted
• Top 10 unmissable events in 2010
• Seven spa breaks for January