Europe for Dummies by Reid BramblettThe Official Description
Lively and engaging, this invaluable handbook puts the continent’s great cities and regions at your fingertips, and includes all the highlights plus the very best off-the-beaten-path experiences that make any visit to Europe memorable. Packed with experienced insider tips, Europe For Dummies offers:
- Essential information on London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich & the Bavarian Alps, Vienna, Prague, Rome, Florence & Tuscany, Venice, Barcelona, and Athens
- A select choice of favorite hotels and eateries in every destination and price category
- Indispensable foreign language glossaries
- Advice on everything from planning a sensible itinerary and getting the best deals to using public transit and catching must-see sights
- Helpful tips on converting currencies, overcoming language barrier, avoiding crowds, and sampling local cuisine
Honest Feedback
Couldn’t have done without it!
“This is a Bible for those clueless about what to do and what to expect in Europe when making their first trip. I destroyed the book by tearing out pages that were relevant but it was so worth it.”
Just what I needed
This is exactly what I needed before I leave for Europe for the semester. Great book. Excellent quality.
Wonderful Beginners’ Book
I’m trying to plan my first trip to Europe and wasn’t sure where to start. Europe for Dummies is a great first step! It gives great general tips and is a useful tool in deciding which countries and attractions are going to be the best fit for me. It has a lot of practical information about what time of year to visit, which festivals occur when, and customs that will help you fit in. Highly recommended for anyone who is looking for general information on planning a European trip.
Something for a first/second timer..great!
This is a Great book for someone who is visiting Europe and planning to visit europe. There are several cost saving info as well as tools to help you plan a trip based on your budget and likes/dislikes.
Title covers it all
Europe for Dummies is a perfect book for a first or second time traveler to Europe. In March I went on a trip to four countries in Europe and took three different travel guides with me. Europe for Dummies was used much more than the other two that I had brought, and with justified reasons. A previous reviewer said it was too vague, and although I agree with them in some aspects, Europe for Dummies saved us more time and even money in some cases than I ever expected any of the books to. The descriptions are short and full of information, which is what I want when I am traveling. Detailed maps and directions also help make Europe for Dummies a great travel guide. Whether or not you would be buying this book to take with you, or to read it before you go on a trip to Europe, Europe for Dummies is a great source of information to prepare and inform you for the many awesome and surreal sights Europe has to offer. Definitely recommended.
Europe for Dummies
This book was very helpful when studying up on Europe. The manner in which it is writing is very entertaining and easy to understand.
Touring Europe? Great Guide!
My husband and I went on a tour of Europe, so most of the work was done for us. This book was a great supplement and had great tips for things to avoid on the tour. It was a quick reference and narrowed down sites to see, so we could make the most of the little time we had in each country.
Primer for First European Trip
Lots of good, general information, especially useful if you have never been to Europe before. Purchased it before my first trip abroad.
Favorite bits
Here are a few samples of text section from the guide—sorry, no photos as I do not have those rights.
Please keep in mind that that last edition of this book was written in 2005, so not everything excerpted below is necessarily accurate today. For example, Spain was only just getting popular (in a mass tourism sense) back then. As in all things, travel advice changes.
Ten Overlooked Gems
In This Chapter
- Making discoveries in England and Ireland
- Going to off-the-beaten-track museums in Paris
- Heading to the woods in the Netherlands and Austria
- Finding solitude in Ostia Antica and the Venetian Lagoon
- Discovering a whole country—Spain!—or just a little hamlet
This chapter lists ten unforgettable places where you can avoid the tourists and see some cool sights to boot. You may notice that some of these recommendations don’t appear elsewhere in this book because, let’s face it, if I listed them among the must-see attractions, then everybody would want to go and they’d end up being crowded, touristy, and no longer overlooked gems!
Still, all these are within easy striking distance from the major cities, so, for example, you can hit England’s Avebury after Stonehenge, or the Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula just after (or instead of) the Ring of Kerry. I let you know where to begin your journey in each case.
Avebury, England
Okay, so it’s not entirely unknown, but for all the tour buses that pull over to gape at Stonehenge, just 20 miles to the north, Avebury (tel. 01672-539-250; www.nationaltrust.org.uk) receives perhaps one-twentieth the number of visitors. Believe me, a prehistoric circle of stones feels much more mystical when there isn’t a throng of camera-toting tourists posing all around it.
But the relative lack of crowds is not the only reason making Avebury so special. In many ways, visiting here is more rewarding than a stop at the more famous Stonehenge. The Avebury circle is absolutely huge; you even find a small village built halfway into it, with a pub, restaurant, and fine little archaeology museum. At Avebury, there are no fences or strict admission policy as at Stonehenge; you can actually wander around amid the stones, curl up in the shade of one, and watch the sheep and cows grazing on the grass right up to the ancient megaliths.
Buses leave regularly from Salisbury station for Avebury. For details on getting to Salisbury, the jumping off point for Avebury and Stonehenge, see Chapter 11.
Dingle Peninsula, Ireland
Almost everyone flocking to southeastern Ireland heads out of the main town of Killarney to ride around the famed Ring of Kerry. Far fewer know that, just one inlet to the north, the road looping around the Dingle Peninsula is just as spectacular, but with almost none of the crowds to get in your way. Dingle Peninsula has the same sort of fishing hamlets, village pubs, ancient ruins, and stunning vistas as the Ring of Kerry, plus Fungi, the friendly dolphin of Dingle Bay. Tour boats in the town of Dingle head out each day to lure the playful guy up to the surface — and they don’t even charge the standard @@eu10 ($12) fee if Fungi doesn’t show.
Getting to Killarney from Ireland’s big cities is easy. For details on visiting Dingle Peninsula, see Chapter 13.
Paris’s Lesser-known Museums
Everyone piles into Paris’s Louvre and Musée d’Orsay — and they’re worth it. But Paris has more than 145 other museums. Did you know that you can also visit the beautiful little Rodin Museum, 77 rue de Varenne (tel. 01-44-18-61-10; www.musee-rodin.fr), installed in the modest mansion that was once the sculptor’s studio, its rooms now filled with castings of his greatest works while in the lush garden his Thinker ponders amid a bed of roses with the Eiffel Tower in the distance? Or you can search out the Musée du Moyen Age (Museum of the Middle Ages), 6 place Paul Painlevé (tel. 01-53-73-78-00; www.musee-moyenage.fr), installed in the remains of a bathhouse built almost 2,000 years ago during the city’s Roman era.
You can also head to the Marais’s Musée Carnavalet, 23 rue de Sévigné (tel. 01-44-59-58-58; www.paris.fr/musees/musee_carnavalet), dedicated to the history of Paris, or to the Musée Marmottan, 2 rue Louis-Boilly (tel. 01-44-96-50-33; www.marmottan.com), on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne woods, to see Monet’s Impression, Sol Levant, the painting whose title was taken to coin the term “impressionism” that defined that era’s primary artistic movement. And don’t leave out the Musée Picasso, 5 rue de Thorigny (tel .01-42-71-25-21; www.musee-picasso.fr) or the Orangerie, just off place de la Concorde (tel. 01-42-61-30-82), with its 360@dg painting of Waterlillies by Monet (closed until 2005). The list goes on and on — and the busloads of tourists don’t even know that these places exist. For more on the Rodin Museum and Musée Picasso, see Chapter 14.
Hoge Veluwe Park, Netherlands
This large national park outside Arnhem is little visited by foreign tourists. You can ride its white bikes around the park’s many roads and trails for free, exploring a microcosm of the Netherlands’s many environments, from sand dunes to forests to meadows and even formal gardens. Make sure that you stop into the Kröller-Müller Museum, a fantastic and underrated gallery of modern art lost in the middle of the park. This contemporary structure of steel and glass features more than 270 works by van Gogh and hundreds of other paintings and works by 20th-century and contemporary artists. Out back lies one of the most beautiful outdoor sculpture gardens in the world with works hidden along meandering paths that wind through the woods. You can even clamber atop one of the oversized sculptures by Jean Dubuffet. For details on visiting Hoge Veluwe Park, see Chapter 15.
The Heuriger of Grinzig, Austria
If you ride Vienna’s no. 38 trolley out to the end of the line, you arrive at the edge of the fabled Vienna Woods in the wine hamlet of Grinzig. Here, almost every block is home to a different heurige, a small vineyard and wine estate that produces limited quantities of white wine and is only too happy to serve some to you along with family-style platters of roast sausages, dumplings, goulash, pastries, and other hearty Austrian dishes. You can enjoy your feast under aged wood beamed ceilings or, in warm weather, in wine gardens where trees shade the picnic benches crowded by local families and friends out for a day of fine humor, excellent wine, and a good old fashioned heuriger crawl. For more on Austria, see Chapter 17.
Ostia Antica, Italy
At the crack of dawn each morning in Rome, especially in summer, lines of tour buses set out for a long day-trip to Pompeii, where thousands crowd the dusty streets of this famous ancient Roman ghost town. What the tour guides and bus companies don’t tell you is that you can sleep late instead, grab the B metro line, and in well under an hour from Rome be near the Italian shore at another, far less-heralded excavated ancient city called Ostia Antica, the ancient port town of Rome itself.
In many ways, the ruins of this abandoned city are more romantic and evocative than parched, polished Pompeii. Here the cracked mosaic pavements and crumbling brick walls of 1,800-year-old houses, shops, and public buildings flutter with wildflowers; the wagon wheel@@ndrutted flagstone roads hold weeds; and the headless statues lean nonchalantly amidst tall grasses as if simply forgotten. And that’s what the town was — forgotten. Pompeii may have been spectacularly buried in lava, but Ostia just got slowly abandoned as the empire fell, the coast receded, and malaria infested the area. Explore it all here: abandoned temples, an empty theater and amphitheater, wind-swept streets, and the broken remains of wealthy villas, simple flour mills, and public bathhouses. For more on Ancient Ostia, see Chapter 20.
Venetian Islands, Italy
Glorious St. Mark’s Basilica, the Titians and Tintorettos of the Accademia, the graceful Rialto Bridge, the pink and white Doge’s Palace, the modern Peggy Guggenheim, the glass shops and Carnival mask-makers — the touristy side of Venice is all fine and well, but you may miss out on seeing the real Venice if you just hang around these areas. For a more authentic experience — and a slower pace — head to a series of smaller islands strung throughout the vast Venetian lagoon.
Hop a vaporetto (the ferries that serve as Venice’s public buses) and in half an hour you can chug out to bustling Merano, where the art of venetian glass-blowing was born and its main factories still reside, supplying the pricey boutiques are St. Mark’s square with their baubles and glasswares. After wandering its canals and poking into its marvelous Byzantine/Renaissance churches, continue on to the islet of Burano, a fishing village of brightly colored houses and tiny boats bobbing in the little canals.
Another vaporetto leaves from here to carry you to Torcello, the most isolated of the main islands but actually where the earliest lagoon settlement was established (older than Venice itself). Now all that’s left are a few houses, a scraggly vineyard, and a Byzantine cathedral with a tipsy bell tower and gorgeous, glittering mosaics carpeting the apse and the entrance wall. Torcello consists only of one long canal crossed by a single footbridge and another canal angling off. The island is also the improbable home to Locanda Cipriani, a refined restaurant (same owners as Venice’s Harry’s Bar) where Hemingway used to get drunk after a morning spent tromping around in search of inspiration. Headed back to Venice proper on the last vaporetto, the sun setting over the lagoon, you now know the way Venice lives outside the tourist trade.
For more on visiting the islands of Venice, see Chapter 22.
Arena Chapel, Padova, Italy
Giotto was the father of modern art, a shepherd turned Gothic painter who, at the start of the 14th century, kick-started the artistic revolution that would eventually flower into the Renaissance. You can pay homage to his famous frescoes in Assisi — along with plenty of other visitors — but why not try something different? Few people visit this beautiful chapel, covered almost from floor to ceiling with the master’s vibrant painting, in the bustling university town of Padova just a 20-minute train ride from Venice. For details on visiting Padova, see Chapter 22.
Spain — All of It
Spain spent much of the last century under a dictatorship, so it stayed off the Grand Tour through Europe, and hence didn’t end up on most tourist itineraries. Although the backpackers are slowly rediscovering it, and in summer the Brits flock to the coastal resorts and the islands of Ibizia, Majorca, and Menorca (its their equivalent to our Cancun or the Caribbean), Spain is still woefully overlooked by most travelers.
Their loss.
This country’s rich history and amalgamated heritage of Celtic, Roman, Moorish, Basque, and various native influences make it one of the most diverse and culturally dense nations in Europe. Madrid is stuffed with museums, and Barcelona is an eminently livable city where life centers around a broad, park-like pedestrian boulevard that runs through the very heart of town.
But if you have to pick one region to explore, choose the southlands of Andalusia (www.andalucia.org), full of genteel Moorish castles, Christian cathedrals, medieval quarters, Renaissance and baroque palaces and churches, and whitewashed villages. When we think of Spain, we think bullfights, flamenco dancing, and fine sherries. Well, all those Spanish icons hail originally from Andalusia, and there’s nowhere better to experience life a l’Española than in the cities of Seville, Granada, and Córdoba, the hill towns northeast of Jerez (home of sherry), and the beaches of the Costa del Sol around Málaga.
For details on Madrid or Barcelona, see Chapters 23 and 24, respectively.
Medieval Hamlets and Hill Towns
If you want to turn back the clock and see villages and small towns where the leisurely pace of life has helped keep the winding stone streets in a veritable time capsule, Europe is the place to go. You find places where the only signs of modern civilization seem to be a few cars and telephone wires (they hide well the high-speed Internet hook-ups in the living rooms and the cell phones in everyone’s pockets). Most of these, dare we call them “quaint,” old villages are just a short bus or train ride outside major cities.
San Gimignano, in Tuscany, bristles with 14 medieval stone towers just a hop, skip, and a jump from Florence (see Chapter 21). Chartres, with its glorious Gothic cathedral, is just an hour from Paris on the train (see Chapter 14). Salisbury and its massive Gothic cathedral is a similar easy day-trip from London — plus you can fit in the bonus of Stonehenge or Avebury (see Chapter 11). Toledo, once the capital of Castille, is today a bright, oversized village full of El Greco paintings (after meandering from his Grecian home through Venice and then Spain, he eventually settled here) that’s an easy day’s jaunt out from Madrid (see Chapter 23).
The hamlets high in the Lauterbrunnen Valley of the Swiss Alps are centuries away in attitude from the grand business capital cities of Switzerland, and even from the busy and modernized resort town of Interlaken at the valley’s mouth (see Chapter 18). And the tidy Tyrolean town of Innsbruck nestles its medieval alleyways and baroque facades amid the Austrian Alps halfway between Vienna and Munich, making for a perfect stop between the two cities (see Chapter 17).
Exploring Athens
The congested, sprawling, and polluted appearance of Athens today can’t hide the fact that it was once the center of Western culture. The world-class sights located here are a testament to the city’s history as the seat of European civilization, and they mustn’t be missed.
Athens’s top sights
<BestoftheBest>
The Acropolis and the Parthenon
The Acropolis is part of Greece’s identity, a landmark that symbolizes the country itself. At the top rests the mighty Parthenon, a temple that rises nobly above Athens, reminding the modern city of its ancient heritage. Allow a good two to three hours to tour the Acropolis and its museum.
You enter by climbing stairs to the Beulé Gate, built by the Roman Emperor Valerian in A.D. 267. The cute little Ionic temple of Athena Nike (built 424 B.C., rebuilt A.D. 1940) is perched on your right as you climb.
The world has bigger and better-preserved ancient shrines, but the Parthenon still remains the poster child of Greek temples. Between 447 and 438 B.C., the Athenians spent lavishly to build this shrine to their patron. A 40-foot statue of Athena (a small Roman copy of it is in the National Archaeological Museum) once graced this all-marble temple.
The structure is perfectly proportioned, and a few architectural tricks make it appear flawless to the naked eye. To compensate for the eye’s natural tendency to create illusions, the horizontal surfaces are bowed slightly upward in the middle to appear perfectly level, the columns lean slightly inward to appear parallel, and each is thicker in the middle so it looks like a textbook cylinder to you and me.
The Parthenon remained virtually intact through the Middle Ages. It became an Orthodox church in the sixth century, a Catholic church during the Crusades, and an Islamic mosque when the Turks occupied the region. But its luck ran out when the Venetians attacked the Turkish city in 1687. The Turks stored ammunition in the old temple, and when a Venetian cannonball hit the stockpile, the armaments exploded and blew the Parthenon to pieces.
Although the temple was once covered almost entirely with sculptures and ornamental carvings, only a few sculptured spots remain on the Parthenon today. British Lord Elgin collected almost all the other sculpted friezes and pediment pieces from the rubble — destroying many in the process — and shipped them to England from 1801 to 1811. These bits of the original Parthenon remain in the British Museum, even though the Greek government has asked for their return many times. British officials have repeatedly refused, citing Athens’ lack of a suitable museum in which to display the marbles. In response, Athens has begun to construct such a museum at the foot of the Acropolis. Although the hope was that it would be completed in time for the Olympics (and the Greeks could use the international attention to once again pressure the Brits), the structure is, as of this writing, still just a construction site.
<Tip>
If you look down the Acropolis’s south side, you see the half-moon shapes of two theaters. The huge one to the east that is mostly in ruins is the Theater of Dionysos, built in 330 B.C. (entrance on Dionyssíous Aeropayítou; 010-322-4625). Near the entrance to the Acropolis lies the Odeum of Heródes Átticus, which was built in A.D. 174 and restored in recent centuries to stage concerts during the Athens Festival from June to October (for information, call the festival office at 010-322-1459 or the Odeum at 010-323-2771).
<HeadsUp>
The €12 ($15) admission ticket is valid for seven days and includes admission to the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum, the Ancient Agora, the Theater of Dionysus, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and the Karameikos Cemetery as well as the Roman Forum and the Tower of the Winds. It is still possible for visitors to buy individual tickets at sights other than the Acropolis.
The Acropolis entrance is on the west side of the hill and can be reached from a path off Dioskoúon and Theorías streets. 210-321-0219; 010-323-6665 for the museum. Metro: Acropolis. Bus/trolley: A2, A2e, A3, 1, 5, 9, 15, 40, 57, 110, 126, or 230. Admission: 12€ ($15) ; free the first Sunday of the months Oct–June and every Sunday Nov–Mar. Acropolis open: Summer, Tues–Sun 8 a.m.–7 p.m., Mon noon to 7 p.m.; winter, daily 8:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; closed occasionally in the early afternoon. Acropolis Museum open: Mon 11 a.m.–7 p.m., Tues– Sun 8 a.m.– 7 p.m. Call the Greek National Tourism Organization ( 210-331-0437) for details and precise hours for this year.
<BestoftheBest>
The Ancient Agora (market)
The everyday life of ancient Athenians revolved around the Agora, or marketplace. But like the Forum in Rome, not much is left of the historic market today; it appears as little more than a dusty bowl filled with mangy trees, broken-down pediments among the grass, and rows of broken column stubs marking the borders of temples and buildings from a bygone era. Still, the Agora takes a good two hours to sift through the rubble and study the reconstructed bits — longer for real students of history.
The Hephaisteion, built between 449 and 444 B.C. (and one of the world’s best-preserved Greek temples), and the reconstructed Stoa of Attalos are the two most remarkable remains. A stoa was a series of columns spaced evenly apart supporting a long roof under which shopkeepers set up business, people met, and philosophers held court in the shade. One famous thinker named Zeno held classes under a stoa so often that his disciples were known as the Stoics.
The Agora’s interesting museum is in the huge Stoa of Attalos, which was built in the second century B.C. and rebuilt in the 1950s. In many ways, the Agora is a museum of modern democracy; the most fascinating artifacts document systems the ancients used to carry out their famous democratic processes. For example, you can see bronze jury ballots — jurors voted with a bronze wheel with a solid axle if they felt the man on trial was innocent, with an empty axle if they found the defendant’s story as hollow as the rod.
The museum also has a marble kleroterion (allotment machine) that looks very much like a modern Lotto machine. Bronze tickets bearing the names of government officials were inserted into slots, and colored balls would fall from a tube and randomly determine who among those names would fulfill various civic duties, such as serving on a committee.
The museum also has a collection of pottery shards called óstraka, on which, once a year, Athenians could write the name of any man they thought had gained too much power and thus threatened the democracy. If any person’s name appeared on the majority of óstraka, he would be ostracized, or banished, from Athens for ten years. (And now you know where the term came from.)
The entrance to the Ancient Agora is on Andrianou Street at Ayiou Philippou Square, just east of Monastiráki Square and below the Acropolis. Metro: Thiseio or Monastiráki. Bus/trolley: 35 or 731. 210-321-0185. Admission: 4€ ($5) adults. Open: Daily 8:30 a.m.–7:30 p.m.
<WorthTheSearch>
National Archaeological Museum
(Neapolis)
This museum is one of the greatest archaeological museums in the world — a testament to all of Greece’s eminence and beauty hundreds of years before the rise of Rome and thousands of years before Columbus set sail for the New World.
In 2002 the museum closed for renovations, and it was scheduled to reopen in June 2004, in time for the Olympic Games. Although the hours and admission were set at press time, the arrangement of the collection won’t be revealed until its reopening.
<Tip>
You need three hours for even a perfunctory run-through. Aspiring archaeologists may want to stay most of a day and maybe even part of a second. The collections are hard to understand fully or enjoy without plenty of background info, so I recommend you invest in a catalog guide.
Life-sized and oversized bronze statues from Athens’s Golden Age (400s B.C.) are the most striking artifacts in the museum. These include Poseidon about to throw his (now missing) trident, a tiny child jockey atop a galloping horse, and the “Marathon Boy” striking a disco pose. Most of these bronzes were found at the bottom of the ocean in shipwrecks by divers in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Representing the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., the museum presents statues of kouroi — attractive young men with cornrow hair, taking one step forward with their arms rigidly at their sides. These figures, adapted from Egyptian models, set the standard in Greek art until the Classical period ushered in more anatomically correct and naturalistic sculpture.
44 Patissíon (October 28 Ave.; several long blocks north of Omónia Square). 210-821-7717 or 210-821-7724. www.culture.gr. Bus/trolley: A5, A8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 22, 60, or 200. Admission: 6€ ($8) adults, free under 18 and the first Sunday of each month. Open: Tues–Thurs 8:30 a.m.–3 p.m. and Fri–Sun 8 a.m.–7 p.m. In winter Mon 10:30 a.m.–7 p.m., Tues–Sun 8:30 a.m.–3 p.m.
N. P. Goulandris Foundation Museum of Cycladic Art
(Kolonáki)
If you have an hour to spare, this museum is the best of all the others in town after the National Archaeological Museum. The Goulandris has wonderfully informative plaques describing each piece in a collection that celebrates the art and simple sculpture of the Cycladic tradition, which began in about 3,000 B.C. Famed 20th-century artists such as Brancusi, Henry Moore, Modigliani, and Picasso were all inspired by these sculptures. The museum’s second floor houses ancient Greek pieces, many from the fifth century B.C.
4 Neophy@astou Douká Kolonáki. 210-722-8321 or 210-722-8323. www.cycladic-m.gr. Metro: Evangelismos. Bus/trolley: A5, A6, A95, E7, 3, 7, 8, 13, 200, 214, 220, 221, 222, or 235. Admission: 3.50€ ($4.40) adults, 1.80€ ($2.25) students. Open: Mon and Wed–Fri 10 a.m.–4 p.m., Sat 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
More cool things to see and do
From seeking out a hidden ruin to taking in a performance of folkloric music and dancing, Athens offers much more to keep you busy.
- Wandering the city in search of less touristy ruins. It seems that everyone who visits Athens makes a beeline to the Acropolis, and most also find their way to the Agora and the National Archaeological Museum, but then many travelers set sail for the islands, leaving the rest of the city’s vast archaeological heritage to the few who stay an extra day and explore a bit.
The best of the remaining ancient sites includes Hadrian’s Arch (on Amalías Avenue, between Vasilissis Olgas and Dionissiou streets), through which the Roman emperor marched in A.D. 132 to dedicate the gigantic Temple of the Olympian Zeus ( 210-922-6330). Built a little bit at a time between 515 B.C. and A.D. 132, the temple measures 360 by 143 feet. Fifteen of the original 104 columns are still standing, each an impressive 56 feet high. The sight is open daily from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; admission is 2€ ($2.50).
The octagonal Tower of the Wind (where Eolou Avenue ends at Pelopída Street) was built in the first century B.C. and once held a water clock, which measured time by the fall or flow of water. In the 18th century, whirling dervishes did their religious spinning dance at the tower.
An ancient cemetery called the Keramikós ( 210-346-3553), 500 yards from the Agora at 148 Ermoú St., was outside the walls of the ancient city. You can still see some of the old walls here, as well as the ancient city gates. The cemetery site has roads lined with tombs and includes a section of the Sacred Way. Bonus trivia: The clay collected from the banks of the stream that runs through this cemetery (called, remember, Keramikós) was perfect for making pottery, hence the word: “ceramics.” Hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; admission is 2€ ($2.50). - Seeing the changing of the guard. Athens’s version of this tradition is much more entertaining than its London counterpart. The guards wear shoes with pom-poms on the toes and march in a comical, stiff-legged style. They stand at attention in front of the Parliament building and march back and forth in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (both are on Syntagma Square). The duty-rotation ceremony occurs every Sunday at 10:30 a.m.
- Enjoying some Greek music and dancing. All over Athens, bouzoúki clubs — named after a mandolin-type instrument often played in them — can give you a tase of traditional folk music and dancing. The musical styles include the rebétika tunes of the urban lower class or dimotiká, upbeat country folk music.
Greeks traditionally show their appreciation for the music by smashing plates, but you should check with the staff before you do this because many clubs don’t allow this anymore, or have substituted tossing napkins. (Places that still do let you smash plates charge you or let you buy them before the show.)
<tip> As you get farther from the Pláka neighborhood, the clubs get more authentically Greek. Still, most clubs are used to seeing a lot of tourists, and the waiters can teach you some simple dances. Things really get busy around 11 p.m., but if you want a good seat you better arrive early.
For good rebétika music, try Rebétiki Istorís, 181 Odos Ippókratous ( 210-642-4937); Taximi, 29 Odos Isávron ( 210-363-9919); or Stoa Athanaton, 19 Sofokleous in the Centrsal Meat Market ( 010-321-4362). Taverna Mostroú, 22 Odos Mnissikléos ( 010-324-2441), is a top-notch dimotiká club. More club info is available in Athenscope magazine, which you can get at news kiosks.
You can see the most authentic, artistic folk dancing in the open-air shows put on by performers from the Dora Stratou Folk Dance Theater ( 210-924-4395 or 210-922-6210), May through September nightly at 9 p.m. (plus 8:15 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays) on Philopáppou Hill.
