Acropolis Museum

The Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 with a thesis disguised as a building: everything found on the rock, displayed in daylight, in sight of the Parthenon itself — and one floor deliberately left half-empty. Bernard Tschumi's top-storey Parthenon Gallery is rotated off the building's grid to align exactly with the temple visible through its glass walls, and the frieze is mounted at the temple's true dimensions: original blocks in honey-coloured marble, plaster casts in dead white for the pieces in the British Museum. No wall text argues for the marbles' return; the white gaps do it silently.

You enter over glass floors above an excavated Athenian neighbourhood — streets, baths and mosaics from 3,000 years of ordinary city life under the museum, opened as its own walk-through level. The ramp up mirrors the climb to the rock: votive offerings first, then the Archaic gallery's smiling korai still holding traces of their paint, then the five original caryatids of the Erechtheion on their own balcony, one pedestal left conspicuously vacant for their sister in London. Look for the Kritios Boy at the ramp's top — the statue where Greek sculpture first shifted its weight onto one leg and came alive, around 480 BC.

Do the museum and the rock as one thought, and if you can, museum first: the frieze, the pediments and the caryatids furnish the bare temple you'll climb to — the Acropolis makes twice the sense afterwards. Late afternoon in the museum, then the rock's final two hours, is the connoisseur's order and dodges both crowds at once.

The café terrace on level two has a straight-on Parthenon view at a fraction of rooftop-bar prices, and Friday evenings the museum stays open late with the restaurant running — the most civilised cheap date in Athens.