Author Archives: Diana Farr Louis

“Even though I majored in English Literature in college, I was never fond of Ezra Pound’s poetry (or politics). Even though T. S. Eliot dedicated ‘The Waste Land’ to him, calling him il miglior fabbro—the best maker—because of his valuable editing (and playing on the original Greek meaning of the word poietes, maker/creator/poet), to me […]

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge By Diana Farr Louis The iconic Greek family at their dinner table. “When I was young, growing up on Long Island, my father used to bring home The New York World-Telegram and Sun when he came back from his Wall Street office in the evening. Every Christmas season, I looked […]

“This column, first published last May, was the result of several months spent exploring The Big Olive for a new book, 111 Places in Athens That You Shouldn’t Miss. I intended it as a teaser. Now the book has been released and so I’m hoping you’ll reread this and rush out to buy it, from […]

“The summer’s unseasonal storms, which did more harm than good, followed a rainless winter and spring. Even as early as mid-June, not long after we arrived to stay, locals were telling dire tales of trickling springs, water rationing in the main towns, and rivers reduced to dry beds.”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is The Best […]

“Our hostess explains, laughing, that the name of this estate/vineyard in southern Evia probably means Mount of Leaves, from the Italian foglie, but that it could just as easily be Monto Folly or Mount of Fools. ‘It was madness to buy it and you have to be crazy to work as hard as we have to […]

“‘Is Tom there?’ I can still hear my father mimicking the girls who used to call my teenage brother several times a day back in the mid-1940s. He would lift his own voice an octave or two and make it simper, rising at the end of the question.”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is The Best […]

“As my father was born on June 2, 1892, I never fail to think of him this month. A sugar broker who loved his job and the commodity, he would have been horrified by all the bad news surrounding sugar these days and he would have scorned all the substitutes. I don’t have much of […]

“The real revolutionaries are those who keep going with a smile, with a thought for their fellow residents, and respond to our straitened circumstances in creative ways, refusing to be cowed by nefarious politicians and the iniquitous IMF, which keeps insisting on further cuts to pensions while conceding that their own policies helped deepen our […]

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge  By Diana Farr Louis “The site of The Mysteries, one of the holiest in the Ancient World, was not on any but the most scholarly tourist’s list of ‘must sees.’ Only an expert could make sense of the jumbled heaps of chopped columns and sculptural fragments, overlapping floors, and […]

“One day, though, I had an epiphany. I must have been about twelve or 13, and my classmate Doris had asked me over for Sunday lunch. They had no servants and her mother was the cook. I can’t remember whether we ate in the kitchen or not, but I do remember watching her take a […]