Crossing the causeway that joins the small fortress island of Monemvasia to the south-eastern Peloponnese, with the Aegean glittering on either side, I thought of Yiannis Ritsos, among Greece’s most admired 20th-century poets. Ritsos lived here in Monemvasia, in a home now turned into a museum beside the ochre-coloured castle walls. One line of his stayed with me: “The voyage is neither a leave-taking nor a home-coming – an ethereal bridge …” My own journey into the far south of the Peloponnese