Athens in October, then the ferry out: marble at eight in the morning, meze at midnight, and an island for the day

Everyone told us Athens was a two-day city, see the rock, get the ferry. Everyone was wrong, and I say that as the one who argued for two days. We gave it five in October, when the heat has broken and the light has gone soft and the Athenians have come back from their islands, and it was the best city break we have done, and Ellie has the list to prove it.

The rock

The Acropolis is timed entry now, booked on the official site, and the slot to get is the first one at eight, which we did, and I would do again in a heartbeat: the path up through the olive trees with the city still quiet, the gate, and then the Parthenon in the early light with maybe sixty people instead of six thousand, the marble the colour of old bone, the columns leaning in slightly so that from below they look straight, which the Greeks worked out two and a half thousand years ago and nobody has improved on. By ten the coaches had arrived and the path up was a conveyor belt. We were having coffee by then. Freddo espresso, cold, shaken, in a tall glass, which is how the whole city drinks it from April to October and which I have now had to give up at home because it is not the same.

The Acropolis Museum is at the bottom of the hill, separate ticket, and it is one of the best museums I have been in: glass floors over the excavations under the building, the sculptures from the temples arranged in the order they sat on the building, and the top floor the same size and angle as the Parthenon itself, with the frieze running round it and gaps where the missing pieces are, in London, which is a conversation we had, Ellie and I, and I am not going to repeat here.

The city

The Ancient Agora below the rock is the marketplace where Socrates got on everyone's nerves, now a field of ruins and a reconstructed colonnade, the Stoa of Attalos, which is a museum with shade, and shade matters even in October. The Temple of Olympian Zeus is fifteen columns standing out of a hundred and four, one of them lying down in pieces where a storm dropped it in 1852, with Hadrian's arch by the road. The National Archaeological Museum is Ellie's museum, the big one, the gold mask of Agamemnon which is not of Agamemnon, the bronze of the god throwing something that might be a thunderbolt and might be a trident, and the room of grave stones that made both of us go quiet.

Syntagma Square has the parliament and the guards in front of it in their white kilts and pompom shoes, and they change on the hour with a slow high-kicking march that looks ridiculous until you see their faces and understand that it is not. The full ceremony is on Sunday at eleven with the band and we went, with half the city. Monastiraki on the same morning is the flea market, which spills out of the square into the side streets: records, army surplus, icons, a man selling only doorknobs. The rooftop bars round the square all face the Acropolis and we had a beer on one at four in the afternoon with the rock floating over the roofs. Plaka is the old quarter below the rock, tavernas and souvenir tat, and above it, if you climb, Anafiotika, a village of whitewashed houses built by workers from the islands in the 1800s, lanes a shoulder wide, cats, bougainvillea, and no one. Lycabettus is the other hill, the pointy one, with a funicular up and a chapel on top, and we did it at sunset and watched the whole city go orange to the sea.

Out

Cape Sounion is an hour down the coast, and you go in the late afternoon for the sunset at the Temple of Poseidon, white columns on a headland with the sea on three sides, and the sun going down into it while everyone on the headland says nothing. Lord Byron carved his name on a column. You cannot get close enough to find it now. We looked.

The islands question is the one everybody asks, and our answer was one day, not one week: the ferry from Piraeus to Aegina takes about an hour, and you get a harbour town with fishing boats and a pistachio stall every ten metres, a Doric temple on a hill with pines round it, and a swim in October that Ellie described as refreshing and I described in other words. We ate grilled octopus on the quay and got the evening boat back with the sun behind us and Athens coming up ahead, and that was enough. The week version is a different holiday. This one was Athens with an island in it, and that was the right way round.

The eating

Meze is how you eat here: small plates, lots of them, late. Grilled octopus, fried courgette, tzatziki that bears no relation to what we buy at home, horta, which is wild greens with lemon, feta baked with honey, lamb off a spit, and a jug of the house wine, and then a glass of something clear on the house that you do not ask about. Dinner starts at nine. We ate at ten most nights, in Psyrri, where the streets fill up with tables and nobody is in a hurry. Souvlaki from a hole in the wall at lunch, in pitta, with chips inside it, which is correct. A five per cent tip is what the locals leave and we left it.

What was worth it

The first slot on the rock, the museum, Sounion, the ferry for a day, Anafiotika, the Sunday guards. What was not: Plaka at dinner time, where the menus have photographs, and my plan to walk up Lycabettus at midday, which Ellie would like recorded.

What I know now

October. Eight o'clock. The museum straight after. Dinner at ten, not seven. One island, not six. Freddo, not frappe, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise. And five days, not two, because the rock is the reason you come and the city is the reason you stay.