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Athens has been occupied by human beings for somewhere between eleven and thirteen thousand years, which puts it in a category of ancient habitation that almost nothing else in the Western world can match. The Parthenon on the Acropolis was completed in 432 BC under Pericles as a treasury and temple to Athena and has been a mosque, a church, and a gunpowder store in the centuries since a Venetian mortar hit the stored Ottoman ammunition in 1687 and blew out its interior. What remains is still the most carefully studied ruin in the Western world, perched on a limestone plateau above a modern city of five million people who spend considerable time complaining about traffic.

The National Archaeological Museum on Patission Avenue holds the largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities anywhere on earth: gold death masks from Mycenae, the Antikythera Mechanism (the world's oldest analog computer, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901), bronze statues pulled from the sea floor, and room after room of pottery, jewelry, and sculpture that make it clear just how extraordinary the artistic output of ancient Attica was.

Down the hill from the Acropolis, the Plaka neighborhood has been continuously inhabited for so long that it simply contains layers of everything, Byzantine churches half-buried in levels below the street, neoclassical facades from the 19th-century independence era, and tavernas where the menu has not changed since the 1970s.