The avenue is lined with the homes of people who mattered, repurposed for a republic. The villa where Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos lived is now part of the British Embassy. The mansion of Sophie de Marbois-Lebrun, the Duchess of Plaisance - a flamboyant American-born French noblewoman who scandalized and fascinated 19th-century Athens - became the Byzantine and Christian Museum. The grand house of the shipping and business magnate Othon Stathatos now belongs to the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art. These were private fortunes turned into public culture, the gilded interiors of one era opened to the crowds of the next. Most of the buildings along the avenue went up in the 1950s and 60s, but earlier neoclassical survivors from the start of the 20th century still hold their ground among them.

Walk the avenue and you cross the world without leaving Athens. The flags of Argentina, France, Serbia, Portugal, Brazil, and the United Kingdom hang from buildings within a few blocks of one another. The United States Embassy is among the most striking - a modernist block designed by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, who had emigrated to America in 1937 and brought his vision of mid-century modernism to classical Athens. Diplomacy clusters here for the same reason the museums do: the addresses are good, the buildings are grand, and the street has carried the city's institutional weight for over a century. Banks, high-end hotels like the Hilton, and the discreet private practices of the city's doctors fill the spaces in between.

More than an address, Vasilissis Sofias is where Athens stores its memory and its art. The Benaki Museum, the National Gallery, the Athens War Museum, the Byzantine and Christian Museum, and the Athens Concert Hall all stand on or just off the avenue, with the green expanse of the National Gardens spilling along its first stretch. The street was first paved in the early 20th century, threaded with trolley lines, and after the Second World War and the Greek Civil War it sprouted the eight- and ten-storey blocks that give it its present shape. Three Metro stations now serve it along Line 3 - Syntagma, Evangelismos, and Megaro Moussikis - and since the 2000s through-traffic has been pushed off parts of it, leaving the grand frontages a little more room to breathe.