Routes Through Athens is a poetic and musical tour through the historical Athens city centre to places where monuments from all periods of the city’s history, from antiquity to the present day, stand side by side. Fondas Ladis started writing the poems in 1995 and completed them in autumn 2001 and were published in a book of poetry along with photographs of Athens. Composer Christos Nikolopoulos has set eleven of these to music, along with five others of similar content by the same poet, in a series of songs under the same title. They were released on one CD in December 2002 (Christos Nikolopoulos is the best known active composer of Greek popular music and on of the most widely acclaimed virtuoso bouzouki player).

In the work Routes Through Athens, the composer used an orchestra that includes mandolins and bouzoukis. In this way he marries the sound of the contemporary Greek urban song with the traditional Athenian mandolinata (an ensemble of mandolins), a throwback to the early 20^th century, which has left a strong stamp and conjures up many memories in Greek musical composition today, but is also tied in to the tradition of the classic rembetiko.