Acropolis of Athens

The rock is visible from half of Athens, so the climb feels like walking toward something you have already been circling for days.

Through the Propylaea gateway the Parthenon appears at an angle rather than head-on, and its scale and the honey colour of the marble land harder in person than in any photo.

The summit is bare, bright and windy, with the whole white city spreading to the mountains and the sea on every side.

Up close the marble is pitted and patched with restoration scaffolding; this is a monument being actively conserved, not a frozen ruin.

The Acropolis is a flat-topped limestone outcrop 156 metres above sea level, its plateau crown of Classical buildings — the Parthenon, Erechtheion, Propylaea and Temple of Athena Nike — representing the most complete architectural statement of the ancient Greek world.

The Parthenon was constructed between 447 and 432 BC under the political direction of Pericles and the artistic direction of the sculptor Pheidias, its Doric colonnade of 46 outer columns and 23 inner columns surrounding an inner chamber that housed a gold and ivory statue of Athena.

The Erechtheion to the north is one of the most complex buildings of the ancient world, its Porch of the Caryatids — six female figures serving as architectural columns — adapted in later centuries by architects from Andrea Palladio to John Soane as one of the most copied details in Western architecture.

It is the single most influential group of buildings in the whole of Western architecture, endlessly copied in banks, museums and parliaments but never actually equalled.

Standing among the columns connects the abstract textbook idea of 'classical Greece' to a real hill with real weight, light and weathered stone underfoot.

The view over Athens from the top, taking in the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Agora and the sea beyond Piraeus, is one of the great city panoramas of the Mediterranean.