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#italy

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #italy




Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.


Marion Zimmer Bradley


#history #italy #language #rome #visceral-imagery

…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”…


E.M. Forster


#florence #flowers #italy #travel #violets

My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts' chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church. In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one's habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. But above all I grew up tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion. I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education 'so as not to give them complexes', 'so that they don't feel different from the others.' I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.


Italo Calvino


#italy #musing #parenthood #philosophical #politics

Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have...undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It's because he doesn't care! He's in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery. I am so tired of saying no, waking up in the morning and recalling every single thing I ate the day before, counting every calorie I consumed so I know just how much self loathing to take into the shower. I'm going for it. I have no interest in being obese, I'm just through with the guilt. So this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to finish this pizza, and then we are going to go watch the soccer game, and tomorrow we are going to go on a little date and buy ourselves some bigger jeans.


Elizabeth Gilbert


#funny #italy #jeans #love #self-esteem

First of all, let's get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It's alluring, but complicated. It's the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or in the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.


Beppe Severgnini


#italians #italy #humor

...Noi leggeveamo un giorno per diletto Di Lancialotto, come amor lo strinse; Soli eravamo e senza alcun sospetto Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso; Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse. Quando leggemmo il disiato riso Esser baciato da cotanto amante, Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse: Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante." ""We were reading one day, to pass the time, of Lancelot, how love had seized him. We were alone, and without any suspicion And time and time again our eyes would meet over that literature, and our faces paled, and yet one point alone won us. When we had read how the desired smile was kissed by so true a lover, This one, who never shall be parted from me, kissed my mouth, all a-tremble. Gallehault was the book and he who wrote it That day we read no further.


Dante Alighieri


#italian #italy #l-inferno #love

Italy is a divided country without a center.


Christian Lacroix


#country #divided #italy #without

In Italy, the Milanese are well organized but follow bourgeois taste. They adhere to certain codes of elegance, but not to individualism.


Christian Lacroix


#bourgeois #certain #codes #elegance #follow

You go to a restaurant in the States and kids have these game boards at the table. You don't see that in Italy or Spain. It's not because they can't afford to buy them, it's because that's not what eating together as a family is about.


Emeril Lagasse


#afford #because #boards #buy #eating

In Italy, I had an Afro, and a lot of the kids came up and felt my hair. It really was funny. I wish I had understood Italian.


Sugar Ray Leonard


#felt #funny #had #hair #i






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