Quotations on / about italy

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

(Annie Dillard (b. 1945), U.S. author. The Writing Life, ch. 5 (1989).)
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In Italy, for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

(Graham Greene (1904-1991), British author, screenwriter, and Carol Reed. Carol Reed. Harry Lime (Orson Welles), The Third Man (1949). To his friend, writer Holly Martins. Based On Greene's Novel.)
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Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.

(Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "Take the Red-Eye....," Epigraph, How To Save Your Own Life (1977).)
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How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), British poet, critic. repr. In Collected Works, vol. 14, ed. Kathleen Coburn (1990). "Table Talk," April 18, 1833, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (1835).)
More quotations from: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

(Edith Wharton (1862-1937), U.S. author. Letter, March 8, 1903. The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).)
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Opera once was an important social instrument—especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

(Luciano Berio (b. 1925), Italian composer. interview in Observer Review (London, Feb. 5, 1989).)
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It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Self-Reliance," Essays, First Series (1841, repr. 1847).)
More quotations from: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty, in both the last:
The force of Nature could no farther go;
To make a third she joined the former two.

(John Dryden (1631-1700), British poet. Lines Printed under the Engraved Portrait of Milton (l. 1-6). . . Oxford Anthology of English Literature, The, Vols. I-II. Frank Kermode and John Hollander, general eds. (1973) Oxford University Press (Also published as six paperback vols.: Medieval English Literature, J. B. Trapp, ed.; The Literature of Renaissance England, John Hollander and Frank Kermode, eds.; The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, Martin Price, ed.; Romantic Poetry and Prose, Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, eds.; Victorian Prose and Poetry, Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom, eds.; Modern British Literature, Frank Kermode and John Hollander, eds.).)
More quotations from: John Dryden

Until recently the word fascist was considered shameful. Fortunately, that period has passed. In fact, there is now a reassessment of how much grandpa Benito did for Italy.

(Alessandra Mussolini, Italian actor, politician, and medical student. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 19 (February 17, 1992). The granddaughter of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was announcing that she intended to run for Parliament as a neofascist candidate.)
More quotations from: Alessandra Mussolini

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand ... borders upon insanity and absurdity—or at least is reminiscent of childhood.

(Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), Russian journalist, political thinker. Trans. by Constance Garnett (1924-1927). "Miscellaneous Pieces: Beyond the Alps," vol. 3, pt. 8, My Past and Thoughts (1921).)
More quotations from: Alexander Herzen