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5727ed4
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"Amor, ch'al cor gentile ratto s'apprende prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende. Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona, Mi prese del costui piacer si forte, Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona..." "Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart, Seized him with my beautiful form That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me. Love, which pardons no beloved from loving, took me so strongly with delight in him That, as you see, it still abandons me not..."
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poetry
love
medieval-literature
italy
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Dante Alighieri |
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e6288ff
|
Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.
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page-178
italy
urban-planning
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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965cdfa
|
"Noi leggeveamo un giorno per diletto Di Lancialotto, come amor lo strinse; Soli eravamo e senza alcun sospetto Per piu 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 bacio tutto tremante. Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse: Quel giorno piu 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.
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l-inferno
italian
italy
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Dante Alighieri |
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fde3cc8
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Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn't want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247)
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mediterranean
italy
food
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7582bc5
|
And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.
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venice
italy
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Donna Leon |
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fddfef4
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"Eccolo!" he exclaimed. At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. "Courage!" cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. "Courage and love." She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her..."
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kiss
romance
violets
first-kiss
italy
flowers
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E.M. Forster |
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9e63bcf
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"Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too."
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|
politics
humor
george-bush
italy
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
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7c516d5
|
Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.
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history
visceral-imagery
italy
language
rome
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Marion Zimmer Bradley |
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ca8aef4
|
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 to be beautiful.
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|
people
italy
wine
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E.M. Forster |
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ddc45f0
|
At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.
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sense-of-place
italy
home
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Frances Mayes |
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9b92b6a
|
"I picked up a snake once. In Italy." "Why did you do that?" "For a bet." "Was it poisonous?" "We didn't know. That was the point of the bet." "Did it bite you?" "Of course." "Why of course?" "It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?" --
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|
thomas-cromwell
italy
snakes
stories
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Hilary Mantel |
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ba4df34
|
"No, mother; no. She was really keen on Italy. This travel is quite a crisis for her." He found the situation full of whimsical romance: there was something half attractive, half repellent in the thought of this vulgar woman journeying to places he loved and revered. Why should she not be transfigured? The same had happened to the Goths."
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italy
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E.M. Forster |
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6f22d15
|
"In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. "It's a lazy man's meal.", she always said. "What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?"
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italy
lazy
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Jess Walter |
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2c9aaca
|
I suppose it had never struck him that, Ischia, which he looked at every evening to see what the weather would be like the next day, or Vesuvius, pearly in the dawn, had anything to do with him at all; but when he ceased to have them before his eyes he realized, in some dim fashion that they were as much part of him as his hands and his feet.
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|
italy
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
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2f95903
|
"Mr. Herriton, don't - please, Mr. Herriton - a dentist. His father's a dentist." Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die."
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romance
italy
disgust
|
E.M. Forster |
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45f7195
|
"..."The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don't suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse's. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn't we?" He appealed to Lucy. "There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine's great stories. 'My dear sister loves flowers,' it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue -- vases and jugs -- and the story ends with 'So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.' It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets."..."
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|
travel
violets
florence
italy
flowers
|
E.M. Forster |
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977c0c6
|
The road of the pass was hard and smooth and not yet dusty in the early morning.
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italy
wwii
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Ernest Hemingway |
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4d8d89a
|
"Now we're going to one of the coolest places in Florence." "Where's that?" "A pharmacy." "You're taking the princess to a drugstore?" "I said a pharmacy. Climb on." Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella is a pharmacy only in the ancient sense of the word. As soon as I saw and smelled what "pharmacy" it was, I recognized it as the origin of the exquisitely wrapped, handcrafted soaps, colognes, potpourris, and creams I had seen in their shop on New York's Lower East Side. But nothing could compare with seeing them in the frescoed chapel where thirteenth-century Dominican friars had first experimented with elixirs and potions. Centuries-old apothecary jars and bottles sat on the shelves of carved wooden cupboards that swept almost to the top of a high, vaulted ceiling. I walked slowly around the room, taking it all in, as Danny spoke to a smartly dressed salesgirl. "What an incredible place!" I sighed, walking over to stand beside him. "It's so beautiful." "Pretty special," he agreed, putting his hand high on my back and turning to the salesperson. "I think mimosa," he told her. "A very good choice, I think," she said, dabbing a small amount of mimosa eau de cologne on my wrist and then my neck with a delicate applicator. Danny bent forward so he could smell my neck, then stood back. He drew his eyebrows together and put his hands on his hips. "I definitely think that's you. First, you get this oddly enticing tart kick, then you detect the sweetness. It's a subtle sweetness- not overpowering, but definitely there." "Hilarious," I said sarcastically and kicked him playfully in the shin. "Then you get the kick again," he winced, rubbing his leg." --
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florence
kick
mimosa
pharmacy
italy
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Nancy Verde Barr |
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cbd2b9b
|
erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries--America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.
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|
cowboys
empires
italy
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Jess Walter |
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469a9f8
|
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.
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|
restaurant
villa
zia-lucia
isabel-and-cormac
italy
|
Susan Wiggs |
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2f41abb
|
Go Home. Cut your losses. Stay. Go for it. You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy. All these voices waving their arms and screaming at one another.
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mind
humor
indecision
italy
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Jay McInerney |
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a6ca145
|
"We'll be in Parma, Bologna, Florence, Ravenna, and the hills of Chianti with our own 'Morning in America' chef, Casey Costello, who will cook in the kitchens with real Italians. We'll show you how true parmigiano-reggiano is made and see the fat pigs that give us Parma ham. You'll learn how to cook a Tuscan steak the size of a cow, make a real Bolognese sauce, pasta the Italian way"- she leaned forward and gave the camera a coquettish twinkle- "and what to do with a squiggling eel." Who could resist?"
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|
sally-woods
italy
|
Nancy Verde Barr |