About its historic and artistic heritage, about its
climate, about its people, wine, food, mountains, and sea. Italy has
been considered a Paradise for many famous travelers. Below is a
short anthology of what some of them said....
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Thomas Mann
"This
was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty this city,
half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose
insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously
blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling
tones of somniferous eroticism."
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Percy
Bysshe Shelley
“No sooner had we arrived in
Italy than the loveliness of the
earth and the serenity of the sky made the greatest
difference in my sensation”
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Mark Twain
"The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo."
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Charles Dickens
“The noble
bay
of
Genoa,
with the deep blue Mediterranean, lies stretched out
near at hand.”
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Sir Walter Scott
"Methinks I will not die quite happy without having seen
something of that Rome of which I have read so much."
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Goethe
“To have seen
Italy
without seeing
Sicily
is not having seen Italy
at all. For
Sicily
is the key of everything”
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Madame de Stael
“It is truly a pleasure to hear the
Tuscans speak.”
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Nathaniel
Hawthorne
“I believe that no place could be
found where life passes, in its essences, more
delightfully than here”
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Giuseppe Verdi
"You may have the universe if I may have Italy." |
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Truman Capote
"Venice is like eating an entire box
of chocolate liqueurs in one go."
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Aldous Huxley
“There is a hint of Michelangelo in
that white cloud set off by that dark shadow.”
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D.H.
Lawrence
“I
sat and looked at the
Lake
(Garda). It was beautiful as Paradise, as the first
creation.”
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
“We watch the ocean and the sky
together, under the roof of blue Italian weather.”
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Bertrand Russell
“Italy and the spring and the first
love all together should suffice to made the gloomiest
person happy."
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Alfred de Musset
“To think how I loved the flowers,
fields and sonnets of Petrarch!”
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Aldous Huxley
“I like to imagine that amidst
those mountains dwell the spirits of great sculptors.”
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D. H. Lawrence
"One must love
Italy if one has lived there. It is
so non-moral. It leaves the soul to be free”.
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Albert Camus
“Florence!
One of the only places in
Europe
where I understood that underneath my revolt, a consent
was lying dormant”
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Mary Shelley
“Here I find the secret of Italian
Poetry… Here the poets of Italy tasted the sweet of those
enchanted gardens which they describe… and wonder at
their bright imaginations; but they drew only from
reality”
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Edith Wharton
"Was it in short, ever well to be
elsewhere when one might be in Italy?"
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