OF SEA & STONE

In a quiet corner of mainland Greece, a glamorous new resort offers access to extraordinary treasures, both natural and archaeological.

- Rachel Howard

When Petros Themelis first visited the ruins of Ancient Messene in 1986, there wasn't much to see: only a few broken columns, strewn around the vineyards and olive groves, and some of the colossal foundations of the city's fourth-century B.C. fortifications. Over the intervening millennia, whole sections of the city walls had been carted away for use in other buildings. Farmers had wrenched the metal from monuments to make tools and used broken statues and epigraphs to build walls to protect their flocks and crops. Gradually, a city that had flourished for 800 years was turned into a de facto quarry, then covered with earth and used as farmland.

Widely acknowledged as a leading archaeologist of his generation, Themelis had already worked on some of Greece's most famous ruins: the palace of Vergina, the sanctuary at Delphi, the stadium of ancient Olympia. Ancient Messene must have seemed like a backwater in comparison-a waterlogged valley in the southwestern Peloponnese, huddled against the slopes of Mount Ithomi. But as Themelis dug deeper, an incredibly sophisticated settlement came to light, just as the secondcentury A.D. travel writer Pausanias had described it.

Right around the time Themelis was beginning his dig, 40 miles to the south a very different type of project was breaking ground-one that would also alter the fate of this often overlooked region. There, a local shipowner was quietly laying the foundations for the most ambitious luxury tourism development in Greece. He gradually bought up huge parcels of coastal land in Messinia, with a master plan to create a modern landmark of a very different kind.

Though I grew up in Greece, I had never been to Messene. So I was totally blown away by the scale, splendor, and masterful reconstruction of the 2,500-yearold city that stretched before me as I stood on the veranda of the only taverna in Ithomi, a sweet village shaped like an amphitheater overlooking the monuments.