Authors on Italy

Any of you who are familiar with my site know what an Italophile I am.

That hardly makes me original. I’m simply following the lead of a long line of authors, poets, painters and composers singing Italy’s praises. If you find yourself in Rome, be sure to take a look at my earlier post on the Cemetery of Artists and Poets to see the final resting place of many of them who called Rome home.

I thought I would share with you some of my favorite quotes about Italy:

The name of Italy has magic in its very syllables.

-Mary Shelley

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liquers in one go.

-Truman Capote

“Italy, my Italy! Queen Mary’s saying serves for me– (When fortune’s malice Lost her Calais)– Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, “Italy.””

- Robert Browning

Remember that it’s only by going off the track that you get to know the country … And don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.

-E.M. Forster

“They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and be beautiful.”

-E.M. Forster

“Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.

- Henry James

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

- Henry James

“You may have the universe if I may have Italy”

-Giuseppe Verdi (from Attila)

And you, readers? Any favorite author quotes about Italy? I’d love to hear them.

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