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“Hey, I just thought of something."
"What?"
"When we're together, we make one whole Italian.”
― Jenna Evans Welch, Love & Gelato

“You know, people come to Italy for all sorts of reasons, but when they stay, it's for the same two things."
"What?"
"Love and gelato.”
― Jenna Evans Welch, Love & Gelato

“In America, one must be something, but in Italy one can simply be.”
― Pietros Maneos, The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos

“All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“We had never before been to Italy in May, and it is truly the most wonderful month. The Lucchese countryside is a riot of colour and scent. Every road, even the busy autostrada, is lined with brilliant red poppies, making the most mundane street look picturesque. The olive trees dotting the hills are covered with silvery green and the pale cream of new buds, while the grass is tall and soft, every patch threaded with wildflowers.”
― Louise Badger, Todo in Tuscany: The Dog at the Villa

“The road of the pass was hard and smooth and not yet dusty in the early morning.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

“Italy, like areas of her childhood, is a part of her world she has always kept secret from her husband. These are places she goes to renew her virginity.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.”
― Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines

“I suppose it had never struck him that, Ischia, which he looked at every evening to see what the weather would be like the next day, or Vesuvius, pearly in the dawn, had anything to do with him at all; but when he ceased to have them before his eyes he realized, in some dim fashion that they were as much part of him as his hands and his feet.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Salvatore

“They spent the day with Lucia, who promised that the following day she would take them up to Scala, an even tinier, loftier town where her parents now lived. That evening, Mac took her to a restaurant called Il Flauto di Pan- Pan's Flute- perched at the Villa Cimbrone among the gardens and crumbling walls. It was probably the most beautiful restaurant she'd ever seen. The centuries-old villa was embellished with incredible gardens of fuchsia bougainvillea, lemon and cypress trees and flowering herbs that scented the air. Their veranda table had an impossibly gorgeous view of the sea.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Beekeeper's Ball

“The thing about settling down that freaks me out is that you're being honest, You're saying, this is me. This is what I can do. This is it.”
― Lucy Diamond, One Night in Italy

“I must have been about four years old when Russia took hold of me with giant hands. That grip has never lessened. For me, the love of my heart, the fulfilment of the senses and the kingdom of the mind all met here. This book is the story of my obsession. In her essays, The Sentimental Traveller, Vernon Lee wrote of her emotion for Italy thus: ‘There are moments in all our lives, most often, alas! during childhood, when we possess the mystic gift of consecration, of steeping things in our soul’s essence, and making them thereby different from all others, for ever sovereign and sacred to us.â€� So Italy became to her â€� so Russia to me.”
― Lesley Blanch, Journey into the Mind's Eye: Fragments of an Autobiography

“There are many of us who live alongside others, less fortunate, watching them go through everyday suffering for one reason or another, and we’re not moving even our little finger to help them. It’s in human nature, unfortunately: for the most part, the only people we genuinely care about are ourselves. However, once in a while we encounter different species, different kind of human beings among us: full of compassion, willing and wanting to help, and doing so with joy and happiness. Those are a rarity. But you know what, my dear? Being one of them is not a special calling- it’s a choice. So what will you choose, huh?”
― Yoleen Valai, The Rebirth of Francesca

“â€� Could I return, I will not say to revel, but breath this sky, under which I was born: to rejoice with sea views and gardens; to consol me with your kindness; to drink this wine or this water, that might reduce my illnessâ€�”
― Torquato Tasso

“What can you possibly say about Rome?
That it's eternal? That all roads lead to it? That it wasn't built in a day? That when there you should do as the locals do?

Please.
For millennia, Rome has embodied and repelled every cliché, description, and act of comprehension or explanation applied to it.
As a city, it has been built and destroyed and rebuilt by - and has celebrated and signified and outlasted - caesars and barbarians and popes and Fascists and prophets and artists and pilgrims and schemers and migrants and lovers and fools.”
― Shawn Levy, Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome

“Se mai continga che 'l poema sacro
al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,
sì che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro,
vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra
del bello ovile ov'io dormi' agnello,
nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra;
con altra voce omai, con altro vello
ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte
del mio battesmo prenderò 'l cappello”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“There are olive trees outside and the imagined smell of their bark and silvered leaves brings with it the first unfurling of some new imperative she feels coiled up within her. Her whole body with a joyful shout know it is back in Italy.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the bel casino, the 'fine mess', has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country's most important patriots, Massimo D'Azeglio, wrote: 'I can't live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance and laziness. I'm like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.' That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It's not just that everything is troppo bello, 'too beautiful', or that food and conversation are so good. It's that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is 'akin to that of being in love', and it's easy to understand what he meant. There's the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country's sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country's 'joys are far more intense and more lasting'. You can't have one without the other.”
― Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy: An Incisive Portrait of Europe's Most Beautiful, Most Disconcerting Country

“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

“Dante Alighieri wrote his first book in the prosimetrum genre â€� La Vita Nuova â€� in 14th century Florence. Since I’m compiling this collection â€� my first indie publication â€� in Florence, just blocks from Dante’s house, and since his book involves a lost love, and ‘A New Life,â€� I thought it fitting to emulate this style in my own casual, intuitive fashion. My hope is that the juxtaposition of poems, journal entries, essays and prose will create a story; a memoir in anarchistic vignettes.”
― Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

“I looked up and beyond him again, focusing in on the horror that swords, arrows, clubs, and staffs left behind on human flesh. The open wounds. The blood, The brokenness. The inglorious remains of war.”
― Lisa Tawn Bergren, Bourne

“Sergeant Missouri crouched close to the ground, pulling up his collar against the bitter, gusting winds. Show me, he thought tiredly, I'm from Missouri.”
― Maureen Daly, Small War of Sergeant Donkey

“Looking up, Missouri saw a formation of low-flying P-47's on the horizon, heading up the coast from Naples...Sergeant Missouri laughed aloud. "They're sending us the Air Force, Chico, and we made it with a donkey," he said.”
― Maureen Daly, Small War of Sergeant Donkey

“Some mules just seem to be born with the hee-haw habit. Back home we call those fellows 'Missouri Nightingales'.”
― Maureen Daly, Small War of Sergeant Donkey

“Il vino buono si beve solo d'estate, quando si deve fare molto lavoro: si porta sul campo per pranzo o quando si ha bisogno di energia. (la dieta di un contadino mantovano nel 1870)”
― Gabriele Pallotti, Che storia! La storia italiana raccontata in modo semplice e chiaro

“He has come to lead me to that elusive place where promises take us and dreams carry us further.”
― Melissa Muldoon, Dreaming Sophia

“What about the motorcycle parts?"
"Those belong to my sort-of boyfriend. He's in Italy right now, visiting his family, and I like to have the mess around to remind me of him."
"Oh. So that's why Dante in Italian."
She blushed and looked away. "No. That's why the Italian boyfriend.”
― Kat Richardson, Greywalker

“I was scarcely the first, nor the only current, girl of impressive derivation to be unceremoniously thrust through the iron gate at the entrance of Le Murate by parents whose aspirations for their daughters did not include marriage. Our paths to the convent were varied, but no matter. We all wound up in the same habit.”
― Kelsey Brickl, Paint

“In the upper echelons of the Church, the authoritarian and anti-liberal elements within fascism resonated with those â€� and they included Pius XI â€� who had come to see the turmoil and conflict that had convulsed the world in recent decades as symptoms of the deep moral malaise that had afflicted Western society since the time of the Enlightenment, with its corrosive doctrines of rights and popular sovereignty.”
― Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy