The Museum Mile: Vasilissis Sofias
Four museums, a line of embassy mansions, and the grandest avenue in modern Athens. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Benaki Museum
Start at the top of the avenue with the Benaki — Greek art across every era in a fine neoclassical house, and one of the best museum cafés in the city on the roof. Buy a coffee up there for the view over the National Garden even if the galleries can wait.

2. Museum of Cycladic Art
A short step off the avenue: the marble figurines that taught Brâncuși and Modigliani how to look. Spare slabs of stone, faces reduced to a nose and a line. Small, perfectly judged, never crowded. Give it the hour it deserves.

3. Byzantine and Christian Museum
Down a drive off the avenue, set in the Villa Ilissia — a duchess's 1840s mansion turned museum. Icons, mosaics and a thousand years of the Eastern church, in galleries dug calmly into the garden. The grounds alone are worth the gate.

4. War Museum
The brutalist 1970s block next door, with aircraft and artillery parked in the forecourt. You don't have to go in — kids tend to love the planes — but the building is a sharp counterpoint to the mansions, and the forecourt is free to wander.

5. The embassy mansions
Walk the avenue itself: the line of grand 19th- and early-20th-century houses, many now embassies, behind railings and old trees. This was where Athens built its wealth in stone. Read the brass plates and the flags as you go.

6. Megaron — the concert hall
End at the *Megaro Mousikis*, the city's concert hall, with its own metro stop right outside. Check the board for the evening's programme; if nothing's on, the marble lobby and the gardens behind still make a clean full-stop to the walk.

The Museum Mile: Vasilissis Sofias