Athens

Athens invented most of the ideas the West still argues about, then spent twenty-five centuries watching everyone else take the credit politely. The Acropolis floats above the apartment blocks like a thesis statement in marble; below it the city is loud, ungovernable and warmly alive — orange trees on the sidewalks, arguments in the cafés, laundry between neoclassical balconies. Democracy was born here and still behaves like a local.

The sensible traveller climbs the sacred rock at opening — eight in the morning, before the heat and the tour groups summit together —, gives the Acropolis Museum its two hours for the marbles gathered under glass, loses the afternoon in Plaka's and Monastiraki's lanes where every ruin is somebody's neighbor, and ends on Lycabettus or a rooftop at dusk, when the Parthenon turns to honey and the city switches on like a circuit board.

The Guide's honesty: August is a kiln with archaeology — travel at the edges of the day —; the flea market's antiquities are as old as last Tuesday: buy for charm, not provenance; the taverna with the view charges for the view — the best food is two streets behind it, where the chairs are plastic and the grandmother is real; and the evzones change guard on the hour, wool pom-poms and all: Sunday at eleven is the full parade.