Athens for The Curious Wanderers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Past the souvenir rails, the last coppersmiths at the Ermou end still beat briki pots and trays; follow the hammering.

Pantelis Melissinos cuts sandals to your foot in his father's workshop, the one that shod Sophia Loren and the Beatles; allow an hour.

Souvlaki since 1967 at paper-covered tables where market porters and printers eat before the bars open around them.

The 1886 iron halls at full volume: butchers shouting prices, fish on ice, and the spice sellers of Evripidou spilling out the back.

Andronikos of Kyrrhos's octagonal horologion with its water clock, later a dervish tekke; the eight wind gods still circle the frieze.

Two doors down to a cellar with no sign and no menu: chickpeas, fried fish, retsina from the barrel, since 1887.

Sunday morning the antique dealers spread brass, icons and Bakelite on the cobbles; the furniture restorers work in the arcades behind.

Ziller's Iliou Melathron, Schliemann's mansion with Pompeian frescoes and Trojan mosaics, now holding coins from Croesus onward; the garden café is the quietest in the centre.

Mezze in the courtyard of an old neighbourhood school, sausage from Drama and cheese from Naxos, under the mulberry trees.

The cross-section exposed by the metro: the Peisistratid aqueduct, a Roman bath, Byzantine graves, all read from the escalator.

A shop and small museum of worry beads in amber, bone and faturan, with the maker explaining how a string is weighted to fall.

Tripe soup, lamb with potatoes and ladled stews at a table shared with the butchers who sold the meat; then the metro from Monastiraki.