Fans of Angelina Jolie’s New Netflix Movie ‘Maria’ Need to Stay in This Maria Callas-inspired Hotel

“Maria,” the Angelina Jolie magical-realist biopic imagining Maria Callas’s last days, takes place almost entirely in Paris, save for some black-and-white flashbacks to the diva’s impoverished youth in Nazi-occupied Athens. (There are also a few reminiscences of her performances on world stages, plus a couple of Super-8 style flickering scenes of dreamy times spent on her lover Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the Christina O.)

But while the film, streaming now on Netflix, is making this a Callas moment worldwide, the city of Athens has been celebrating the diva since her rise to fame in the late 1940s. It’s easy to feel Callas’s spirit in the Greek capital, which is as resilient and dramatic as the star herself. 

In the era of film and television–inspired travel, “Maria” might have you plotting a Parisian escape, but I’d lobby for a Greek getaway instead. This summer, I stayed at a Callas-inspired boutique hotel in Athens. I’ve never felt more like a diva than I did sitting in the hot tub on the balcony of my suite at La Divina, sipping wine and gazing up at the illuminated Acropolis. The hotel, which opened in April 2024, was built around 1897 and served as the home to a series of wealthy families until it was seized by the Italian army for use as a barracks during World War II. It then became a zipper factory and was eventually abandoned. In 1996, the International Art Center Atheneum turned the building into a conservatory called the Odeon Atheneum, which became the site of the International Grand Prix de Maria Callas competition. Dedicated to the opera legend, the Odeon displayed a bust of Callas in the concert hall. 

Today, the neoclassical landmark has been restored into a boutique hotel with 12 suites, each named for an opera Callas once performed. (My husband and I stayed in Macbeth; our kids were in La Bohème.) Callas’s arias filled the halls in surround sound, and in our rooms, La Divina chocolate bars inspired by her performances showcased a Callas portrait on the outer box, and a history of the famous show on its interior. 

From the hotel, it was a 13-minute walk down pedestrian streets past the Theseion temple and the Roman forum to the Maria Callas Museum, an intimate, immersive homage to Callas. The top floor recreates moments from Callas’s best-loved operas, inviting the visitor to sit in a forest grove listening to “Norma,” the Druid princess sing; step into the Palazzo Farnese to hear “Tosca” plead with the nefarious Baron Scarpia for her lover’s life; visit a French salon to hear the courtesan Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata”; and attend a master class led by Callas at the Julliard School in New York. The floor below contains Callas’s dresses, her jewelry, her correspondence, and several screens and earphones, so you can listen to her dodge intrusive questions in televised interviews. But my favorite moment might have been in the courtyard outside the museum, in front of Athens’ cathedral, where the museum was hosting several little children coloring in the diva’s portrait.

Callas’s face is not hard to find in Athens; she rises in a mural above the elevator in the Megaro Mousikis metro station, and there’s a bronze statue of her in Roberto Galli park, not far from the Acropolis. Her talent permeates the city even further; an exhibit of her belongings graces the Maria Callas Cultural Space in the Olympia Municipal Music Theatre Maria Callas, where she made her operatic debut in 1944. And devotees can attend performances of all kinds in the 2nd-century Odeon of Herodes Atticus, at the foot of the Acropolis, where Callas sang in 1944, and again, as part of the Athens Festival, in 1957.

While Callas was born in New York, and only lived in Athens from the ages of 13 to 21 before returning to the United States, Greece launched her career — making Athens the perfect destination for a “Maria”-inspired trip.