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Quote by Beppe Severgnini

“First of all, let's get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It's alluring, but complicated. It's the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or in the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.”

Quote by Beppe Severgnini

Book:La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind
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La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind

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Beppe Severgnini

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“Noi leggeveamo un giorno per diletto Di Lancialotto, come amor lo strinse; Soli eravamo e senza alcun sospetto Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso; Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse. Quando leggemmo il disiato riso Esser baciato da cotanto amante, Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse: Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante." ""We were reading one day, to pass the time, of Lancelot, how love had seized him. We were alone, and without any suspicion And time and time again our eyes would meet over that literature, and our faces paled, and yet one point alone won us. When we had read how the desired smile was kissed by so true a lover, This one, who never shall be parted from me, kissed my mouth, all a-tremble. Gallehault was the book and he who wrote it That day we read no further.”

ItalianItalyInfernoL Inferno
Author:Dante Alighieri
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“In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it's time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also - both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, of the disastrous consequence the above suggestion may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city - which means till the end of my days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.”

ItalyVeniceBrodsky
Author:Joseph Brodsky
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