Athens for The Time Travellers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Bernard Tschumi's 2009 concrete tripartite floats on a hundred columns above the excavated Makrygianni quarter, its top gallery rotated to face the Parthenon it awaits.

Dimitris Pikionis laid these walks in 1954 to 1958 from marble fragments of demolished houses, a lesson in paving as composition.

Dinner on Rovertou Galli, south of the Acropolis, with Greek classics and the rock lit above the table; the right first night for a weekend of antiquity.

A licensed guide for two hours on the rock, from the Mycenaean wall to Elgin and the restorers' cranes; book the first slot before the heat.

Renzo Piano's artificial hill with the opera house and National Library beneath a ferrocement canopy the size of a football pitch, and a canal to the sea.

A starred tasting menu on the roof of Architecture Studio's marble-louvred cultural centre, with the city lit up through the slats.

The thousand years the ancient sites skip, in the Duchess of Plaisance's villa: icons, mosaic floors and a reconstructed church, with a garden café.

Takis Zenetos's 1957 industrial block, half demolished and reborn as the National Museum of Contemporary Art; the ribbon windows survived.

Five chefs behind a long open kitchen in a stripped-back room behind the Hilton, wood-oven cooking and a serious cellar.

A 94-metre steel arch over the avenue built for the 2004 games, a warm-up for the Olympic stadium roof two stops north.

Kyriakos Panagiotakos's 1933 polykatoikia, painted ultramarine on Le Corbusier's advice; the type that would fill the city for fifty years.

A bistro with tiled floors and plate-glass in a once-industrial quarter, lamb tongue and greens before the airport metro.