“In America, one must be something, but in Italy one can simply be.”
Source: 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.”
Source: 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.”
Source: 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.”
Source: 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.”
Source: 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.”
Source: Love and War in the Apennines
“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.”
Source: Beneath the Lion's Wings
“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.”
Source: The Beekeeper's Ball
“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.”
Source: Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome
“Learn more about your destiny. Find ways to comprehend it, so that no one can talk you out of it.”
Source: The Daily Dose of Motivational Quotes