How to follow the footsteps of The Odyssey in style
The much anticipated summer blockbuster is here, but where was it filmed?
In The Odyssey, we follow hero Odysseus’s gruelling 10-year journey home, through the unmappable lands of magic and monsters to Ithaca, following the Trojan War.
For centuries, scholars and amateur sleuths have argued over where Homer’s roiling seas, realm of the sirens and lands of the Lotus-Eaters might truly have been — if, indeed, they existed at all.
Now, courtesy of Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Oppenheimer) highly anticipated, lauded film adaptation (out July 17), travellers have a concrete trail of real-world locations to visit, including the Peloponnese and Athens in Greece, Favignana in Sicily, Scotland’s Moray Coast (famous for its resident bottlenose dolphins) and Iceland.
Picture-perfect Peloponnese: the Bourtzi tower at the 13th-century Methoni Castle.
In the Peloponnese, a large peninsula separated from the Greek mainland by the Corinth Canal and easily accessible from Athens, you’ll find a 1,000-mile-long network of scenic hiking routes, much of which uses mule paths that fell out of use in the 1970s.
The Messinia Trail’s eastern branch encompasses the Temple of Apollo Epicurius, ancient olive groves and Methoni Castle and Voidokilia Beach — both used by Nolan — and crosses an area home to legendary King Nestor, who appears in Homer’s seminal poem.
Villa Collective boasts six properties in the Peloponnese region, including Sir Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor’s wonderfully tasteful former home.
In the last decade, Athens's grungy, graffiti-lined back streets have changed beyond recognition. Today, it’s a city of muses, somewhere that writers, artists and culinary talents congregate to help nurse the Athenian renaissance. Its ascendency — or re-ascendency — to southern Europe’s new capital of cool did not come as a surprise to Andria Mitsakos, a local PR entrepreneur and the owner of a popular concept store called Anthologist.
Athens’s ‘moment’ was born, she says, out of ‘crisis’. Grexit (Greece’s potential withdrawal from the EU) has been sowing its seeds of uncertainty since the mid 2010s, but it is precisely this turmoil, Andria explains, that has caused waves of creativity. ‘Athens is constantly evolving and when one realises that the city was the cradle of civilisation and the incubator of so much when it comes to design, architecture, poetry, politics, theatre, philosophy and sexuality, that feeling becomes infectious.’
And infectious it is. Everyone, from domestic Greek travellers to Continental weekenders and young creatives, is keen to get in on the action. There are whispers that this is the new Berlin — equally anarchic, but much more affordable, regardless of whether you’re staying for two nights or two years.
Joan Collins prepares to shoot a scene for 'The Executioner', directed by Sam Wanamaker, at the Hilton Athens in 1969. Greece’s first international chain hotel hosted legendary figures like Aristotle Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Ingmar Bergman
Earlier this year, Hilton Athens reopened following a monumental, four-year-long renovation. Now called Conrad Athens The Ilisian, whoever was in charge thankfully spared the iconic marble facade, a wonderful example of Greek post-war Modernism.
Although Nolan shot some scenes in the Greek capital, it doesn't feature in the source material. However, the hotel is situated on the southern slopes of Mount Lycabettus which, according to Ancient Greek myth, was created by Athena — a pivotal character — by accident.
Approximately 670 miles east as the crow flies you'll find Favignana, the largest of the Aegadian (or Egadi) Islands off Sicily's west coast. And while Homer never explicitly referred to 'Sicily' or 'Favignana' in his epic, scholars and historians tend to agree that both are the setting for some of the most famous stages of Odysseus's journey.
The swimming pool at Zu Nillu is framed on two sides by quarry walls. The Romans used tufa — a type of lightweight, easy-to-cut limestone — to build early defensive walls, tombs and temple platforms.
Nolan utilised the ruined castle of Castello di Santa Caterina on the latter — a location that required the cast and crew to clamber 900 feet uphill, every day, to reach it and helicopter equipment drops.
You won't have to suffer such indignities to reach Zu Nillu, an exceptional villa that's been built into a disused Roman tufa quarry — as you do. The four-bedroom property is available to rent through The Thinking Traveller which originated in Sicily in 2002.
