Italy quotes

Open your heart and you will see graved inside of it,'Italy.' Such lovers old are I and she; So it always was, so it still shall be!

- Robert Browning
  Men and Women,'De Gustibus'.

Fair Italy! Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree; Even in thy desert, what is like to thee?

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza 26.

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, The next in majesty, in both the last: The force of Nature could no farther go; To make a third, she joined the former two.

-John Dryden
  'Epigram on Milton', engraved on the frontispiece to the 1688 edition of Paradise Lost. The three poets are Homer, Virgil and Milton.

Why Silvio Berlusconi is unfit to lead Italy.

-The Economist
Front cover headline. In The Economist, 28  Apr.

   Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.

- Philip Cortelyou Johnson
  Informal talk,  Architectural  Association School of Architecture, 28 Nov. Collected in Writings (1979).

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.

- Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
  Remark,11  Apr. Quoted in  James Boswell  The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.3.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours.With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy beena dealer insecond-hand clothes.Wemean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards. 550

- Emilio FilippoTomasso Marinetti
  Manifesto of Futurism.

   Ihadthoughttoevokethesoulof Italy but all Ifind before me is its corpse.

- Giuseppe Mazzini
Attributed. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith Italy:  A Modern History (1959).

Italy is a geographical expression.

- Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel Metternich
  Letter, 6  Aug.

English artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy.

-John Ruskin
  Modern Painters, vol.1, pt.1,'Of General Principles'.

Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  'Julian and Maddalo', l.57.

Lump the whole thing! Say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!

- Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
  The Innocents Abroad.

Arma virumque cano,Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit Litora. Thisis a tale of arms and of a man.Fated to be an exile, he wasthe first tosail fromtheland of Troyand reach Italy, at its Lavinian shore.

-Virgil full name Publius Vergilius Maro
Aeneid, opening lines (translated byW F Jackson Knight).