From atop the Acropolis, Athens is not especially easy on the eye. Yes, there’s the dazzling Saronic Sea, and the distant, brooding mountains. But the city itself is a dense sprawl of colourless low-rise apartment blocks, forming an all-encompassing concrete glacier. From above, it looks as if the whole landscape is choked under white Lego bricks.

Sure, at street level there’s a compact and elegant commercial district, its boulevards fringed with buildings both classical and neoclassical. A random antique edifice will turn out, mind-blowingly, to have been frequented in its heyday by Socrates, Plato or Aristotle.