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In Athens, Fridays are like the end of term at school. Offices empty early, bags are packed and houses and apartments shuttered and locked with a speed one would normally associate with the threat of plague or the approach of an invading army. The sounds of retreat are everywhere. Telephones are left to ring unanswered. Television sets echo in empty bars and car horns sound more loudly, more frequently and more insistently than at any other time of the week as their drivers head impatiently out of town.

Despite the marbled and pillared majesty of the Parthenon, the conelike heights of Mount Lycabettus and the elegant, tree-shaded squares of Kolonaki, the people who know better leave Athens to the people who know no better - usually first-time tourists who haven't read their guide books properly or learned enough about the inhabitants to know that "weekend" in Greek means "get out of town".

Destinations vary. Some go south along the coast to the beach clubs of Glyfada and the groves of Vouliagmeni, little more than suburbs now in the great chalky sprawl that is Athens, while others head farther afield: to Cape Sounion, Homer's "sacred headland" where Lord Byron scratched his name in the temple stone, or east towards the Bay of Marathon or to traditional country retreats in the highlands of Attica. Others make straight for Piraeus, the ancient port of Athens where, in 500BC, the galleys and triremes of Themistocles' great Athenian fleet were built and moored in the sheltered coves of Zea and Mikrolimano. But they don't come to Piraeus to stay. Some board sleek white yachts and luxury cruisers, while others crowd onto lumbering, hooting ferries or the faster yellow and blue hydrofoils called Flying Dolphins. By whatever means, they're all heading in the same direction, out to sea (as the Greeks have always done), to the islands of the Saronic Gulf: to Salamis and Aegina and to the smaller and more distant islands of Spetsai, Poros and, possibly most celebrated of all, Hydra.

At first sight the splinter-shaped island of Hydra offers an unfriendly and intimidating prospect, a rugged and uncompromising coastline of steep hillsides that slope straight into the sea without benefit of beach or mooring. It is only when you turn abruptly into its concealed, pocket-sized port that you realise the island is inhabited at all, a terracing of red-roofed, white-walled houses rising up from the crowded quayside.

Hidden amongst these houses, and set in the middle of a delightful walled garden only a few blocks back from the port, is the Hotel Miranda, one of many grand mansions in Hydra which date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when fortunes were made by the island's trading fleets. Built by a wealthy Hydriot sea captain in 1810 and designated a national heritage site by Greece's Ministry of Culture, the Miranda creaks with history, from its polished wood floorboards to its lofty, painted ceilings. First opened as an hotel in 1962 and carefully renovated by its present owners in 1990, the Miranda's handful of guest rooms and salons are cool, spacious and elegantly styled with a fine collection of covetable eighteenth and nineteenth-century furnishings, prints, portraits and period artefacts that vividly recall this island's golden age.

A Flying Dolphin will also get you to Nafplio and Monemvasia, two of the most beautiful towns on the Peloponnese Peninsula, which rises like a blue shadow off Hydra's northern coast. Set on the Argolic Gulf, a naval base since Mycenaean times, argued over for centuries by the Turks and Venetians and declared the capital of Greece after the Greek War of Independence, Nafplio is widely regarded as the prettiest port city in the whole country. Overlooked by the mighty ramparts of Palamidi, a Venetian fortress perched on a rocky hill high above the town, Nafplio is also a popular stop on the tourist route with no shortage of accommodation, ranging in styles from luxury to budget.

One of its real finds, however, is a side-street jewel in the heart of the old town called the Hotel Byron, all bleached peach walls and sky-blue shutters built over the dome of a Turkish hammam. After exploring this ancient port with its grid of bougainvillea-draped alleyways and narrow, cobbled streets, there is no finer pleasure than retiring to the terraces and balconies of the Hotel Byron, its eighteen sweetly-decorated rooms opening out onto a patchwork of red-tiled roofs, the bay of Nafplio and a ring of distant mountains.

A little over three hours by hydrofoil from Athens and on the western edge of the Argolic Gulf is the medieval trading port of Monemvasia, girdled by thick walls and overlooked by a ruined fortress crowning the cliffs that rise above the town. Between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries, Monemvasia had a population of between forty and fifty thousand but today there are fewer than a dozen full-time residents. Not that it's fallen into disrepair. For the last twenty years wealthy Athenians, smart Scandinavians and investment-hungry Germans have bought up properties as they've become available, turning them into chic hideaway homes. Under the eagle eye of Greece's National Archaeological Society the restoration has been sensitively managed - no visible TV aerials or air-conditioning units and no terraces or balconies if they didn't feature in the original - preserving Monemvasia's rare and elegant charm.

There are two delightful hotels in Monemvasia and, frankly, it's the very devil to choose between them. Both the Malvasia and Byzantino have rooms and apartments in restored houses in various parts of the town, each with their own private courtyards or balconies and each elegantly if simply furnished with stone floors and fireplaces, beamed ceilings and extravagant rooftop views. With no cars allowed within the walls of this ancient settlement, both hotels make for ideal retreats, with only the sound of the sea to lull you asleep and the chug of fishing boats to wake you each morning.

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