Author Archives: Diana Farr Louis

“Not long ago, we went to a christening in a sweet little church just outside Athens. The ceremony unfolded the way it’s meant to: the priest was benignly pious, the baby howled when dunked in the font, the parents beamed throughout, and the guests were delighted with such a good excuse for a party. I […]

“I’m writing just after the last weekend of Carnival in Greece, which comes to a close not with an Ash Wednesday but with a Clean Monday. This gives Greeks three days on which to celebrate rather than just a single Fat Tuesday. And it seems to me that, despite all the parades and pranks of […]

“It was then I began to feel like Rip Van Winkle. Nothing in our old neighborhood bears any resemblance to the charming quarter of only 20 years ago. When I first arrived, the streets were unpaved and occasionally hosted flocks of sheep.”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is The Best Revenge By Diana Farr Louis ATHENS […]

“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 […]