Ascend the Acropolis with a private archaeologist

The Parthenon was built in nine years, from 447 BC, and has been a temple, a church, a mosque and an ammunition store since. An archaeologist rather than a guide will tell you which parts of what you are looking at are which.

The building is famous for optical corrections that most visitors never notice until they are pointed out: there is barely a straight line in it. The columns swell slightly at the middle, lean inward, and stand closer together at the corners; the platform curves upward at the centre. All of it is deliberate, to make the structure read as perfectly regular to the eye.

The site has taken damage in every century since. A Venetian shell hit the Ottoman powder magazine inside the Parthenon in 1687 and blew the middle out of it; Lord Elgin removed much of the frieze in the early 1800s. The restoration running today is a slow, reversible, stone-by-stone project, which is why there is always scaffolding somewhere.

The Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill is the necessary second half. Its top floor is built to the exact dimensions and orientation of the Parthenon, with the surviving frieze arranged as it stood, and gaps where the London pieces are.