Athens for The Romantics: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Whitewashed Cycladic houses built by Anafi stonemasons in the 1840s, a village stranded on a cliff while the city lights come on below.

The choragic monument of 334 BC once stood inside the Capuchin convent where Byron wrote in 1810; the convent burned, the monument stayed.

Faded mirrors, a piano, and mussels with ouzo above the junk dealers' square; ask for the upstairs table facing the Acropolis.

Yannoulis Halepas's Sleeping Maiden of 1877 lies on the grave of Sofia Afentaki among cypresses, with Schliemann's Doric tomb and a morning of birdsong.

The Onassis Foundation keeps the Alexandrian poet's desk, manuscripts and notebooks in a Plaka townhouse, quiet enough to read Ithaka in the original.

A taverna since 1927 with rebetiko on weekend nights, lamb in lemon sauce, and wine from the barrel under a trellis; stay for the second set.

The Street of Tombs outside the Dipylon gate, the stele of Hegeso bidding farewell to her maid, and the Eridanos still trickling through the reeds.

Climb past the cave called Socrates's prison to the Roman monument of 116 AD and watch the Parthenon catch the last light with the Saronic Gulf behind.

A rooftop in a 1920s house facing the floodlit Acropolis, slow-cooked lamb and a Nemea red; book a corner table weeks ahead.

Fifteen standing columns and a sixteenth lying in its drums where an 1852 storm felled it, with Hadrian's arch marking the city of Theseus from his own.

Chapu and Falguière's 1896 statue of Hellas crowning the poet, then the shaded paths and the sundial Queen Amalia planted the garden around.

The café where publishers and poets have argued since the 1980s; a last coffee, a spoon sweet, and the newspapers.