Vasilissis Sofias is the avenue modern Athens built to look like a capital — a broad, tree-lined run from Syntagma out past the National Garden, lined with the mansions of the people who could afford the view. Today it's the city's museum mile, and you can walk the whole thing in an afternoon, ducking into as many or as few collections as you like.
Start with the Benaki Museum at the top — Greek art from antiquity to the twentieth century, and a roof café worth the lift on its own. A few doors on, the Museum of Cycladic Art holds the spare marble figurines that taught modern sculptors how to simplify. Then the Byzantine and Christian Museum, set in a duchess's villa with a thousand years of icons dug quietly into the garden.
The War Museum next door is the brutalist outlier; go in for the planes or just cross the free forecourt. All the while the avenue runs its line of embassy mansions past you. Finish at the Megaron concert hall, metro outside, and check the board on your way down.
