GREECE

No place pairs a classical education with easy living quite like Greece. The same clement winds, fertile land and easy seas that gave rise to the city states and communities that founded ancient European civilisation still draw in travellers, millennia later. Athens remains a contemporary entry point and a notable archaeological site, yet the mainland has no shortage of competing draws, including Olympia, Delphi, Mycenae and Epidaurus, and the extraordinary rock formations of Meteora.

Cross over to Crete to take in the relics of the Minoan civilisation at sites such as the Palace of Knossos, where carefully preserved archaeology shades into classical myth: the region is closely associated with Theseus and the minotaur.

Light out for the Cyclades – a ring of islands in the Aegean Sea, the largest of which is Naxos – and you’ll be able to take in Venetian mansions (the medieval maritime republic ruled here for centuries), as well as much earlier settlements, nestled in between traditional, whitewashed dwellings.