The Peloponnese

The journey begins with a single step across two seas. An hour from Athens, the road crosses the Corinth Canal, and above it rises the mighty rock of Acrocorinth, the fortress Nolan's cameras turned into Agamemnon's palace walls. Beyond that gateway waits a peninsula that holds three holidays in one: the ancient world, a spectacular coastline and a mountain heartland, all connected by open road and never by ferry timetable.

The heroes come first. At Mycenae you walk beneath the Lion Gate into the citadel of Agamemnon, at Epidaurus a whisper on stage still reaches the highest of fourteen thousand seats, and at Olympia you can run the very track where the games were born. Then the story keeps going where most tours stop: the Byzantine ghost city of Mystras spills down its mountainside near Sparta, and Monemvasia hides a whole medieval town behind a single gate in the rock.

In the southwest, Messinia is where myth, archaeology and cinema share one bay. Voidokilia's perfect omega of golden sand became the Island of the Cyclopes in Nolan's The Odyssey, and the Polyphemus scenes were filmed inside the real Nestor's Cave on the hill above it, a chamber inhabited since 6000 BC that you can admire from the beach below, though not enter. Minutes away stand the true Palace of Nestor, where Homer says young Telemachus came asking for news of his father, and the sea-wrapped castle of Methoni, another face the film made famous. Further east, the caves of Diros glow beneath the Mani, and the vineyards of Nemea, where Hercules fought his lion, pour some of Greece's finest red wine.

With our local team, the land of heroes becomes an effortless road trip: a private driver-guide who threads the legends together, nights in elegant Nafplio or by the beaches of Messinia, tables at village tavernas and wine estates along the way and, if you wish, the Odyssey film locations woven into the classical route. You arrive, and the whole saga is arranged around you.