Peloponnese

Its character shifts with every hour of road. The Argolid, on the east, is a country of orchards, dry stone walls and sudden limestone outcrops, where the air smells of thyme and the plain opens toward the water. Move inland and the land tightens into Arcadia, a high, cool region of wooded ridges and villages built against slopes, where the mountains keep their own weather and the pace slows to the length of a shepherd's walk. Laconia, further south, is sterner. The Taygetus range runs down its spine like a blade, and the towns below it have a worn, soldierly dignity. Messinia, on the western flank, softens again into olive groves that run down to long sandy beaches and quiet bays, and Corinthia, at the northern edge, keeps the memory of the isthmus, the narrow neck of land that joins the region to the rest of the mainland.

A good day here begins early at Mycenae, where the Lion Gate still looks out over the plain as it did three thousand years ago, its stone blocks rough under the hand. By midday you can be at Epidaurus, where the ancient theatre curves into the hillside with such precision that a whisper from the lowest row carries to the top, and then drive south until the road narrows toward Monemvasia. There, a single rock rises from the sea and is joined to the land by a causeway, and the old town climbs its face in lanes too narrow for anything but feet. In the afternoon the Mani offers its towers, grey and square, standing among the scrub like sentries who forgot to leave. Each stop asks for a slower pace than the last, and each one is close enough to the next that the coast never feels far away.

It is the coast that makes people linger. The sea along the Messinian shore changes from turquoise to deep blue in the space of a few metres, and in the evening the castle at Methoni throws its shadow across the water. Staying here is easy to justify. You arrive for one monument and stay for the way light lies on the olive terraces, for bread and cheese eaten on a harbour wall, and for the sense that this region rewards those who stop, look and come back.