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Category: Italy

Quotes about Italy: Orson Welles on Italian Politics and Culture

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; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Orson Welles, an American film director

Quotes about Italy: Thomas Uwins on Artists

There is one point in which Italy in an artist’s eye must always have the preference – I mean the school it provides for study; and in this I do not refer merely to the pictures, statues and works of art in which it abounds, but to the simplicity of the manners of the people … and the historic character of their features and dress … In England a painter must invent everything … In Italy on the contrary, the thing is half made up to his hand.

Thomas Uwins, from Naples, 1825

Quotes about Italy: Joseph Spence on Naples

This is also a wonderful place, or rather its’ environs are so. The town itself except the great street of Toledo is beastly, but the Quay (on which I live in an excellent hotel with a noble view of the Bay) Mt. Vesuvius which is all red hot every night, Portici, Pausilippum, and the rest of the towns on the sea coasts, form one of the most wonderfully delightful scenes I ever saw. The carnival is now begun, and the town full of plays, masquerades, operas, pickpockets, etc…
Joseph Spence from Naples, 1784-85

Quotes about Italy: Mme de Stael on Rome

They entered Rome, not on a fine day, not on a fine night, but on a dark evening, in dreary weather which makes everything dull and indistinct. They crossed the Tiber without noticing it; they entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo which leads straight into the Corso, the main street of the modern city but the least distinctive part of Rome because it is more like other European cities

In Rome, that caravanserai, everything is foreign, even the Romans, who seem to live there not like owners, bur like pilgrims resting beside the ruins.

The common people of Rome are familiar with the arts, and discuss sculpture with good taste. Pictures, monuments, antiques, and a certain level of literary merit, are for them a national interest.

Mme de Stael, Corinne, or Italy (1807)

Consult the first volume in English

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