The Acropolis at Dusk from the Filopappou Hill

Everyone climbs the Acropolis. The path up the south slope is well-maintained, the site is correctly magnificent, and the view from the Propylaea looking out over modern Athens toward the sea gives you the strange double sensation of standing at the beginning of Western civilisation while being surrounded by a gridded 20th-century city. All of this is right and worth doing. But the best view of the Acropolis is not from it — it is of it, from the Filopappou Hill to the southwest, in the last forty-five minutes before sunset.

The Filopappou, or Hill of the Muses, is quieter and less frequented than the main site. A path winds up through pines and rocky outcrops to the Filopappou Monument, a Roman-era tomb at the summit. From here, the Parthenon floats above the Athenian plain in the evening light — the Pentelic marble turning from white to gold to amber as the sun drops — with the Aegean coast visible on clear days and the city spreading in every direction below. The effect is overwhelming and cumulative. The longer you sit with it, the more it opens.

Athens is not trying to impress you. The city is chaotic, traffic-exhausted, covered in graffiti, and operates on a schedule entirely its own. But then you find yourself on a hill at six in the evening watching the Parthenon change colour, eating a souvlaki from a paper wrapper, and realising that the city's relationship with its own history is simply the most intimate of any capital in Europe.