From Athens: Mycenae, Nafplio & Palamidi Fortress

Head southwest from Athens through the Corinth Canal crossing — where a 6km canal cut in 1893 separates mainland Greece from the Peloponnese — and into the Argolis plain. The guide introduces the Bronze Age civilisation of Mycenae: the culture that Homer described in the Iliad and Odyssey, rediscovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 when he found gold masks, shaft graves, and the Lion Gate exactly where the ancient sources said the city of Agamemnon stood.

The citadel of Mycenae was the capital of the most powerful kingdom in the Aegean from approximately 1600 to 1100 BC — the culture that Homer calls the Achaeans, who launched the Trojan War. The Lion Gate (c. 1250 BC) is the oldest monumental sculpture in Europe: two carved lions flanking a central column above the gate lintel, still standing in the massive cyclopean walls built from limestone blocks weighing up to 100 tonnes. Inside: the grave circles where Schliemann found the gold death masks he mistakenly called 'the Mask of Agamemnon', the palace with its megaron (throne room), and the secret cistern that supplied the citadel during siege. The Treasury of Atreus — a 50m-long dromos passage leading to a corbelled beehive chamber 14m high — is the largest and most perfectly engineered Bronze Age structure in Greece.

The sanctuary of Epidaurus was the most important healing centre of the ancient Greek world — pilgrims came from across the Mediterranean to be cured by Asclepius, the god of medicine. The 4th-century BC theater is one of the most perfectly preserved ancient structures in existence: 14,000 seats arranged in 55 rows with acoustics so precise that a whisper on the stage floor is audible in the top row. It is still used for summer performances. The guide covers the sanctuary's role as the ancient world's equivalent of a spa hospital and explains why Greek theaters were always built in the same relationship to the landscape.

Nafplio was the first capital of the newly independent Greek state (1821–1834), before the capital moved to Athens. It is also the most beautiful and best-preserved historic town in the Peloponnese — a dense grid of Venetian, Ottoman, and Neoclassical buildings on a headland overlooking the Argolic Gulf. Dominating it from above is the Palamidi fortress, built by the Venetians between 1711 and 1714 when they reconquered the Peloponnese from the Ottomans. The fortress consists of eight semi-independent bastions connected by walls spread across the 216m summit, designed by French military engineer Lasalle. 999 steps (now 857 after steps were removed) connect it to the town below. Walk the bastions, the baroque gateways, and the views across the gulf that made this the most strategic point in the Eastern Mediterranean.