Storica Italy Quotes

If you deconstruct Italy, you will in the end see a grapevine, a tomato and a small boy hammering a shard of marble. ~ Pietros Maneos

When you are still and thoughtful you are as lovely as the statues they are carving in Italy. ~ Philippa Gregory

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood. ~ Alexander Herzen

Italy spills over to everything. Italy is a huge banking system. It has been the major banking system in Eastern Europe. It's worked with Austria's banking system. There's all sorts of interplays there. So it's not the PIIGS one should worry about. Germany hasn't even begun falling yet. And when Germany falls, and it will, that's when the panic begins to set in. ~ George Friedman

This time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an assault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. I don't know what you saw in Africa and Italy, but I know what I saw in Russia and Poland. We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. It could not be compared to any human action. It could be compared to a weasel in a henhouse. It was as though we felt that if we left anything alive in the East, it would one day bear witness against us and condemn us. And, now, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war ~ Irwin Shaw

As for the liberty of the press, like every other privilege, it must be restrained within certain bounds; for if it is carried to a breach of law, religion, and charity, it becomes one of the greatest evils that ever annoyed the community. If the lowest ruffian may stab your good-name with impunity in England, will you be so uncandid as to exclaim against Italy for the practice of common assassination? To what purpose is our property secured, if our moral character is left defenceless? People ~ Tobias Smollett

One needs a comprehensive concept that decides just how much debt states like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy can sustainably bear. ~ Peter Bofinger

Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful. ~ Roman Coppola

From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with - a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit. ~ Erica Jong

I'm a pretty calm person. That came from living in Italy for a long time. Nothing works, nothing is on time. You have to learn to deal with it. ~ Tom Ford

We arrived in Argentina with a lot of injured players, including our goalkeeper. Also we were unlucky to be drawn in the same group as the two tournament favourites Italy and Argentina. ~ Michel Patini

Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion. People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this:

But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur.

And there aren't any lines in space, so you could join bits of Orion to bits of Lepus or Taurus or Gemini and say that they were a constellation called the Bunch of Grapes or Jesus or the Bicycle (except that they didn't have bicycles in Roman and Greek times, which was when they called Orion Orion). And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don't know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. And that is the truth.

I stayed awake until 5:47. That was the last time I looked at my watch before I fell asleep. It has a luminous face and lights up if you press a button, so I could read it in the dark. I was cold and I was frightened Father might come out and find me. But I felt safer in the garden because I was hidden. I looked at the sky a lot. I ~ Mark Haddon

...is there anywhere in the world as full of beauty as Italy? ~ Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

The more fashionable doctors in Italy, began to delegate to slaves the manual attentions they deemed necessary for their patients ... that the art of medicine went to ruin. ~ Andreas Vesalius

Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:
(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;
(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;
(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest
that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.
This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments. ~ John Ralston Saul

Ambivalence and contradiction energize nearly every figure Michaelangelo carved, from the adolescent Madonna of the Stairs onward...But the four allegories atop the sarcophagi raise them to a symphonic crescendo. Each is a battleground of conflicting emotions and motives, in which will and paralysis battle for supremacy. ~ Eric Scigliano

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on. ~ James E. Burke

Lella York, the self-proclaimed queen of passive-aggressive behavior. [Lella's perceptive view of herself] ~ Maria Grazia Swan

In Bergman's world I represented a sort of intellectual, skeptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated. When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was rather often cast as crazy people, maniacs. It was very good for me and it was fun because it is nice to play crazy people if you are not in reality. And I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists. ~ Erland Josephson

Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty. ~ H.G.Wells

Early eighteenth-century Italy saw facial powder at the center of the biggest scandal ever to befall a cosmetics manufacturer. A woman named Signora Toffana, who was well known in upper-class social circles, created a face powder that contained lead and arsenic and sold it to the wives of noblemen and the wealthy. The more affectionate the husband was with pecks on his wife's cheeks, the faster he died from the toxic powder. An estimated 600 husbands died this way, and Toffana was executed as an accomplice in their deaths. ~ Samuel S. Epstein

We are a trading nation, and we are trading with Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland. ~ Mark Rutte

Perhaps if Hitler had had the wisdom to withdraw his troops and prepare for the defense of his own country, Germany, despite the loss of face this would entail in the losing of all Italy, then the course of the war, if not the outcome, would have been quite different. ~ Christopher Vokes

Then the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy. ~ E. M. Forster

But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time.
I am a vampire.
My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy. ~ Anne Rice

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood. ~ Erica Jong

In which building is the pope?" one woman asked. She was overheard by writer Teresa Dean, who wrote a daily column from the fair. "The pope is not here, madame," the guard said. "Where is he?" "In Italy, Europe, madame." The woman frowned. "Which way is that?" Convinced now that the woman was joking, the guard cheerfully quipped, "Three blocks under the lagoon." She said, "How do I get there? ~ Erik Larson

The golden sunshine of Italy congealed into tears. Here's to alcoholic brotherhood ... much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire. ~ Edward Gibbon

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it's very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand. ~ Bill Buford

There was a sudden sunburst in my head. And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand 150 Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene, An icy shiver down my Age of Stone, And all tomorrows in my funnybone. During ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Polenta is to northern Italy what bread is to Tuscany, what pasta is to Emilia-Romagna and what rice is to the Veneto: easy to make, hungry to absorb other flavours, and hugely versatile. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

I've never been much of a European traveler. London once on a book tour, and Italy because that's where Ferraris are from. That's about it. ~ John Ridley

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd; The next, in majesty; in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go; To make a third, she join'd the former two. ~ John Dryden

Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell. On returning to London, Virginia suffered
a severe, suicidal breakdown. ~ Jane Goldman

He wondered what you had to do to lose your driver's license in Italy. ~ Robert Hellenga

Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship. There was a raw, feral beauty about this landscape that was totally unselfconscious but no less real...There was no pomp or vainty here; this was an innocent, natural beauty, the best kind, like a woman first thing in the morning, lit up by the sun streaming through a window, who doesn't quite believe it when you tell her how beautiful she is. ~ Leonardo Donofrio

It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah the peddler. But Jeremiah travelled to earn his bread, and these other sorts of men are rich enough already. They go on voyages because they are curious. They amble around the world and stare at things, they sail across the oceans as if there's nothing to it at all, and if it goes ill with them in one place they simply pick up and move along to another. ~ Margaret Atwood

A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy. ~ Noel Coward

We are not only talking about waves of refugees coming to Greece, to Italy, and elsewhere. Destabilizing the Balkans means Lebanonization, and that means destabilizing all of Europe. ~ Fatos Nano

I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it. ~ George Clooney

A sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by foreign dominators, all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

She was shocked by how dirty Florence was. ~ Christobel Kent

Had Mr. Gibbon lived in France, Spain, or Italy, he might with the fame reason have ranked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the worship of saints and angels among the essentials of Christianity, as the doctrines of the trinity and of the atonement. ~ Joseph Priestley

So, you invite a wild rabbit living in Italy to a party on the island of Crete. What's it supposed to do, swim there? Its little tux would get wet. ~ Rick Riordan

When I was a young man, King Francois of France greatly admired my bare buttocks. I have that information only by hearsay, of course, because my buttocks were in the king's chateau of Chambord while I was here in Italy. ~ Alan Fisk

Italy to me is like the mean mother. Whatever I do, it's never good enough. People say I'm the queen of Cannes, but in Italy I get turned down for work. ~ Asia Argento

People think being Elvira is a lot of fun - and it is - but I was doing a lot more bizarre stuff before then, just being a dancer and a showgirl and traveling around Italy in a band and working for Playboy Club, and later being a model and meeting a million and one people and being kind of a groupie ... It's all been really interesting. ~ Cassandra Peterson

I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don't know why he chose to write it, but I'm glad he did. He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can't become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American. ~ Ronald Reagan