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“Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections ... and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive, nor take off for weeks, stores are closed and mail ceases to litter one’s threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city... the fog is thick, blinding, and immobile... this is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self-deprecating thoughts of coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you’ve got company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility...”
― Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

“Who can resist sleep at two or three in the afternoon in these sunlit parts of the Mediterranean?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I understand the circumstances, and I chose you. Amore mio, you must believe that nothing can change my choice or how much I love you. There’s only one person who can keep me from you, and that’s you.”
― Marie Ohanesian Nardin, Beneath the Lion's Wings

“Newcomers to manuscripts sometimes ask what such books tell us about the societies that created them. At one level, these Gospel Books describe nothing, for they are not local chronicles but standard Latin translations of religious texts from far away. At the same time, this is itself extraordinarily revealing about Ireland. No one knows how literacy and Christianity had first reached the islands of Ireland, possibly through North Africa. This was clearly no primitive backwater but a civilization which could now read Latin, although never occupied by the Romans, and which was somehow familiar with the texts and artistic designs which have unambiguous parallels in the Coptic and Greek churches, such as carpet pages and Canon tables. Although the Book of Kells itself is as uniquely Irish as anything imaginable, it is a Mediterranean text and the pigments used in making it include orpiment, a yellow made from arsenic sulphide, exported from Italy, where it is found in volcanoes. There are clearly lines of trade and communication unknown to us.”
― Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

“But the daily tasks and prayers of men, the ancient city tired from having lived too long, the ravaged marble and worn out bells, all those things oppressed by the weight of memories, all those perishable things were rendered humble in comparison with the tremendous blazing Alps that tore at the sky with their thousand unyielding spikes, a vast, solitary city that was waiting, perhaps, for a new race of Titans.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“Le poison de Venise, c’est la féerie d’une architecture de songe dans la douceur d’une atmosphère de soie ; ce sont les trésors des siècles, amassés là par une race de marchands et de pirates, la magnificence de l’Orient et de l’ancienne Byzance miraculeusement alliée à la grâce de l’art italien, les mosaïques de Saint-Marc et le revêtement rosé du palais ducal ; le poison de Venise, c’est la solitude de tant de palais déserts, le rêve des lagunes, le rythme nostalgique des gondoles, le grandiose de tant de ruines ; dans des colorations de perles —perles roses à l’aurore et noires au crépuscule â€�, le charme de tristesse et de splendeur de tant de gloires irrémédiablement disparues ; et dans le plus lyrique décor dont se soit jamais enivré le monde, la morbide langueur d’une pourriture sublime.”
― Jean Lorrain, ±Ê±ð±ô±ôé²¹²õ³Ù°ù±ð²õ

“The Tuscan countryside whizzed by in a kaleidoscopic whirl of shapes and colors. Green grass and trees melded with blue sky, purple and yellow wildflowers, peachy-orange villas, brown-and-gray farmhouses, and the occasional red-and-white Autogrill, Italy's (delicious) answer to fast food.”
― Jenny Nelson, Georgia's Kitchen

“Glitterdust across a broad expanse of blue. Before me, the water unfurled like dark swaths of shadowed silk, colors muted, reflections cast by the lamps hanging from the prows of the gondolas rippling, and my heart swelled at the beauty and the romance of it.”
― Megan Chance, Inamorata

“The woman bent down to pick up the fallen pomegranate from the grass. It was ripe, it had burst open in the fall, stained her white dress. The vision of the laden barge, the pale island, the flowery meadow returned to her loving spirit along with the Creator's words: 'This is my body...Take and eat...”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“Go Home. Cut your losses. Stay. Go for it. You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy. All these voices waving their arms and screaming at one another.”
― Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

“A man has not fully lived until he experiences that gentle balmy clime of ancient empires, the land of lemon trees and the genius of Michelangelo.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

“The heat of his night time fever was being brushed away entirely by the breeze as the light mists evaporated. The same process that was happening around him, was happening within him too. He was being reborn with the morning.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“It was like a Stygian plain, like a vision of Hades: a land of shadows, vapours and water. Everything was going misty and disappearing like spirits. The moon was enchanting and pulling at the plain just as she enchants and pulls at the sea, drinking all that vast earthly dampness from the horizon with her silent, insatiable throat.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“Whereas while you're travelling, nobody really knows. While you're travelling you still have the potential to do anything, be anything. It's only when you stop and actually try to do those things that you discover your own capabilities, I guess.”
― Lucy Diamond, One Night in Italy

“Now we're going to one of the coolest places in Florence."
"Where's that?"
"A pharmacy."
"You're taking the princess to a drugstore?"
"I said a pharmacy. Climb on."
Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella is a pharmacy only in the ancient sense of the word. As soon as I saw and smelled what "pharmacy" it was, I recognized it as the origin of the exquisitely wrapped, handcrafted soaps, colognes, potpourris, and creams I had seen in their shop on New York's Lower East Side. But nothing could compare with seeing them in the frescoed chapel where thirteenth-century Dominican friars had first experimented with elixirs and potions. Centuries-old apothecary jars and bottles sat on the shelves of carved wooden cupboards that swept almost to the top of a high, vaulted ceiling. I walked slowly around the room, taking it all in, as Danny spoke to a smartly dressed salesgirl.
"What an incredible place!" I sighed, walking over to stand beside him. "It's so beautiful."
"Pretty special," he agreed, putting his hand high on my back and turning to the salesperson. "I think mimosa," he told her.
"A very good choice, I think," she said, dabbing a small amount of mimosa eau de cologne on my wrist and then my neck with a delicate applicator.
Danny bent forward so he could smell my neck, then stood back. He drew his eyebrows together and put his hands on his hips. "I definitely think that's you. First, you get this oddly enticing tart kick, then you detect the sweetness. It's a subtle sweetness- not overpowering, but definitely there."
"Hilarious," I said sarcastically and kicked him playfully in the shin.
"Then you get the kick again," he winced, rubbing his leg.”
― Nancy Verde Barr, Last Bite

“A real garden is what I would call a parcel of land - any size, anywhere, with any plants or no plants - that is loved and nurtured. It's a personal place, probably enclosed in some way, and imbued with a person's spirit, a gardener's spirit. I'm sure many people think being a gardener sounds like a horrible job. I think it's one of the most rewarding occupations anyone could have â€� I mean to physically make gardens, not just sit down and design one (let's leave that to the designers), and not just take care of grass and plants (maintenance workers can do that). To dedicate your entire being and all the passion and time and knowledge you have to working with plants and shaping them into a living, personal artwork. That's what a real gardener does, and that's why “half-gardenerâ€� is already a compliment.”
― Clark A. Lawrence, Mezzo giardiniere

“She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.”
― Cesare Pavese, The Beautiful Summer

“It is estimated that Italians eat an average of sixty pounds of pasta yearly--- a large bowl of pasta six days a week.”
― Dinah Fried, Fictitious Dishes

“They remained silent, while the bronze tolling passed over their heads so powerfully that they seemed to hear it in the very roots of their hair like a quiver of their flesh.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“He followed the glances of some of them like a ray of love directed at a woman seated somewhere, engrossed in her own thoughts, made languorous by secret delights and softened in some impure way, with a snow-white face in which her mouth opened like a hive damp with honey.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The flame = (il fuoco) - Scholar's Choice Edition

“That which at twilight had appeared to be a silvery sea-god's palace, a structure of twisted sea-shapes, was now a temple built by the cunning genies of Fire.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“Radian. The prisoner's name is Radiana.
Who is keeping her prisoner?
Time, Stelio. Time is guarding the doors with his scythe and his hour-glass, as in all those old prints...”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“People who switch their niceness on and off are not to be trusted.”
― Lucy Diamond, One Night in Italy

“We'll be in Parma, Bologna, Florence, Ravenna, and the hills of Chianti with our own 'Morning in America' chef, Casey Costello, who will cook in the kitchens with real Italians. We'll show you how true parmigiano-reggiano is made and see the fat pigs that give us Parma ham. You'll learn how to cook a Tuscan steak the size of a cow, make a real Bolognese sauce, pasta the Italian way"- she leaned forward and gave the camera a coquettish twinkle- "and what to do with a squiggling eel." Who could resist?”
― Nancy Verde Barr, Last Bite

“I understand the circumstances, and I chose you. Amore mio, you must believe that nothing can change my choice or how much I love you. There’s only one person who can keep me from you, and that’s you. Alvise”
― Marie Ohanesian Nardin, Beneath the Lion's Wings

“A tudi ko bi ne hotel, bi imela vsaj sina, ki bi ga vzgojila, kakor bi želela. Upornika bi vzgojila...”
― Boris Pahor, Qui è proibito parlare

“Opera was born in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. It derived almost seamlessly from its immediate precursor, the intermedio, or lavish between-the-acts spectacle presented in conjunction with a play on festive occasions. Plays were spoken, and their stage settings were simple: a street backed by palace facades for tragedies, by lower-class houses for comedies; for satyr plays or pastorals, the setting was a woodland or country scene. Meanwhile the ever-growing magnificence of state celebrations in Medici Florence on occasions such as dynastic weddings gave rise to a variety of spectacles involving exuberant scenic displays: naval battles in the flooded courtyard of the Pitti Palace, tournaments in the squares, triumphal entries into the city. These all called upon the services of architects, machinists, costume designers, instrumental and vocal artists. Such visual and aural delights also found their way into the theater—not in plays, with their traditional, sober settings, but between the acts of plays. Intermedi had everything the plays had not: miraculous transformations of scenery, flying creatures (both natural and supernatural), dancing, singing. The plays satisfied Renaissance intellects imbued with classical culture; the intermedi fed the new Baroque craving for the marvelous, the incredible, the impossible. By all accounts, no Medici festivities were as grand and lavish as those held through much of the month of May 1589 in conjunction with the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinand I and Christine of Lorraine. The intermedi produced between the acts of a comedy on the evening of May 2 were considered to be the highlight of the entire occasion and were repeated, with different plays, on May 6 and 13. Nearly all the main figures we will read about in connection with the birth of opera took part in the extravagant production, which was many months in the making: Emilio de' Cavalieri acted as intermediary between the court and the theater besides being responsible for the actors and musicians and composing some of the music; Giovanni Bardi conceived the scenarios for the six intermedi and saw to it that his highly allegorical allusions were made clear in the realization. Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini were among the featured singers, as was the madrigal composer Luca Marenzio, who wrote the music for Intermedio 3, described below. The poet responsible for the musical texts, finally, was Ottavio Rinuccini, who wrote the poetry for the earliest operas...”
― Piero Weiss, Opera: A History in Documents

“A lot of countries surrounding Italy aren't so bad. That's because the Roman Empire conquered and raped their women. So there is a little bit of Italian in everybody! This is good news, as all Italians bear this in mind when dealing with our neighbors and other foreign-fucked, heavily raped countries, and it gives us the resolve and compassion to deal with their bullshit.”
― H.C. Blackburne, Observations

“Remember when we took that trip to Puglia?"
He knows that I do. We'd gone for our anniversary a few years ago. We had stayed on the top floor of a small hotel impossibly cantilevered over an expanse of rocky shore. We'd eaten burrata, a Pugliese specialty, every morning for breakfast, with a slab of bread- arguably the best in Italy, still warm from baking overnight in the dying embers of the ancient oven. The cheese would arrive each morning on a tray outside our room, still warm, and wrapped in the customary thick blade of grass, swollen like a ripe piece of fruit.”
― Meredith Mileti, Aftertaste: A Novel in Five Courses

“Aggiungo che a pensarci bene quest'Italia non è un'Italia ideale. È un'Italia che nonostante tutto esiste. Zittita, ridicolizzata, sbeffeggiata, diffamata, insultata, ma esiste. Quindi guai a chi me la tocca. Guai a chi me la invade. Guai a chi me la ruba.”
― Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride