Tripoli organizes itself around its central squares, and the squares organize the life of the wider region. The main streets running north through the city align with two large plazas — one named Kennedy, one named Georgiou B' (George II) — and the southern district runs along a street called Washington. The names are an artifact of postwar Greek politics, when such gestures toward the Western alliance were common. The squares themselves are older in spirit: wide, tree-lined, built for the kind of afternoon life where people sit outside for hours over a coffee and the city's news gets done face-to-face.

The courthouse on Areos Square, designed by the German-born architect Ernst Ziller in the neoclassical style that dominated official Greek building in the nineteenth century, still presides over the square with considerable authority. Ziller designed buildings across Greece during the period of the new Kingdom, and his Tripoli courthouse is one of his regional commissions — solid, columned, and self-consciously European. The archaeological museum nearby, also housed in a Ziller-designed neoclassical building, pulls in a different direction: inward, toward Arcadia's own deep past.

The Archaeological Museum of Tripoli is the repository for finds from across the regional unit of Arcadia, and its collection spans an almost daunting chronological range. Neolithic and Early Helladic objects sit alongside Late Mycenaean material from Paleokastro of Gortyna; Geometric-period pottery from the cemeteries of Mantineia shares cases with Roman-era sculpture and reliefs. A collection of Early Helladic cult figurines from Sakovouni is noted as the only one of its kind in Greece — small fired clay figures that speak of religious practice before the Olympian gods were fully formed.

Also on display are findings from the fifteen-year excavation at the Villa of Herodes Atticus in Loukos Kynourias, the lavish country estate of the second-century Athenian magnate who was one of antiquity's great patrons of architecture. Arcadia, it turns out, was also his countryside.

For visitors with an interest in the Greek War of Independence, the War Museum on the central square of Agios Vassilios fills in the more recent past. Founded in February 2000, it holds weapons, swords, busts, and documents from 1821, including material associated with Theodoros Kolokotronis, the general who was born near Tripoli and whose bronze statue stands in the city.

Tripoli's position at the geographic center of the Peloponnese is not metaphorical — roads radiate from it to every corner of the peninsula. Corinth lies 75 km to the northeast. Kalamata is 65 km to the southwest. Sparti is 60 km to the south. The Moreas Motorway (A7) connects Athens through Corinth to Tripoli and then continues to Kalamata; the city is effectively the interchange where Peloponnesian travel converges.

This centrality is old. Under Ottoman administration, Tripoli — then known as Tripoliçe or Tripolitsa — served as the administrative capital of the Morea province, precisely because of its position in the middle of the peninsula. When the Greek state rebuilt the city in the nineteenth century, its function as a hub did not change; only the flags above the public buildings did. Today Tripoli is also home to the flagship campus of the University of the Peloponnese, established in 2000, which gives the city a younger, more varied population than its size might suggest.

The basin Tripoli sits in is a karst landscape — the Arcadian plateau drains not through rivers but through underground passages called ponors, and after heavy winter rains the low-lying areas to the southwest can flood into a temporary lake, Lake Taka, that appears and recedes with the season. The wider municipality, formed in 2011 from eight smaller units, includes the ancient plain of Mantineia, the highland village of Valtetsi, and the municipality of Tegea — a sweep of Arcadia that carries inside it most of the region's defining stories.

Asteras Tripoli, the local football club, plays in the Superleague — Greece's top tier — at the Theodoros Kolokotronis Stadium one kilometer southeast of the city center. On match days, the squares empty toward the ground. On ordinary days, the squares fill back up. This rhythm of dispersal and return is Tripoli in miniature: a city that empties outward into the Arcadian landscape and gathers itself back, regularly, around its coffee tables and its courts.