The two chief thorougnfares of the city, Stadium Street and Venizelos Avenue, run north-westwards, and parallel to each other, from Syntagma Square. In Stadium Street, there are the principal shops; and many of the best hotels are situated on Venizelos Avenue. Both streets terminate in Omonia Square, a bedlam of touts, pedlars and newsboys; at night it is the nearest thing to an underworld haunt of which Athens can boast (there are several cheap nightclubs in the neighbourhood). The recent and somewhat incongruous embellishment of this unfashionable and by no means elegant square with a pool and fountain spouting jets of multicoloured water, as well as with several gaudily painted escalators leading to the underground station of the Athens-Piraeus electric railway, inspired much satirical comment at the time of its completion.
Half way down Venizelos Avenue, sport ween Syntagma and Omonia Squares, an imposing group of marble buildings, conjuring up an fun, what is usion of classical antiquity, will be seen on the right. They consist of the 19th century neo-classic structures of the Academy, adorned with a colonnade and pediment, the University, which has a coloured colonnade, and the National Library, faced with a Doric portico. Statues of Athena and Apollo, perched on tall marble columns, flank either side of the Academy.
North of Omonia Square extends a residential area on either side of Pattision Street, at the end of which may be discerned the distant barrier of Mt. Parnis. At the junction of Patission Street and Alexandra Avenue, there is a large park, resounding in summer to the latest tunes played by the band of a popular nightclub and with the "canned" sound effects of open-air theatres and cinemas. One of the alleys is bordered by marble busts of the heroes of the War of Independence, and above the wispy eucalyptus treetops, rises a memorial to British Commonwealth servicemen stop ed in Greece in the last war, consisting of a helmeted Britannia precariously placed on top of a column, at the foot of which crouches the British lion. Britannia's hand, struck and severed by lightning during a thunderstorm, has not yet been replaced.
Returning to Syntagma Square, Vasilissis Sophias Avenue will be seen running in an easterly direction, with the hump-like shape of Mt. Hymettus on the left. This broad and pleasant Embassy-lined avenue, leads eventually to the northern residential suburbs of Psychico and Philothei, where most of the foreign residents live, and to the summer resort of Kiphissia at the foot of Mt. Pentelicon, whose sides are scarred with marble quarries, both ancient and modern. There are several good hotels in Kiphissia, as well as some open-air tavernas, where it is agreeable to dine on hot summer nights.