Venice Italy Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Venice Italy. Here they are! All 62 of them:

It's temples and palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation)
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.
Donna Leon (Death in a Strange Country (Commissario Brunetti, #2))
Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.
Andrei Codrescu (New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City)
Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world's attic, there's another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it's Cardiff.
A.A. Gill (Table Talk)
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.
Marie Ohanesian Nardin (Beneath the Lion's Wings)
In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli’s gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers, and quaysides of my native city. I row into the neck of the Grand Canal, and, one by one, the reflection of each colorful façade appears, only to dissipate into wavering, shimmering shards under my oar.
Laura Morelli (The Gondola Maker (Venetian Artisans #2))
She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile.
Pamela Allegretto (Bridge of Sighs and Dreams)
Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections ... and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive, nor take off for weeks, stores are closed and mail ceases to litter one’s threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city... the fog is thick, blinding, and immobile... this is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self-deprecating thoughts of coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you’ve got company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility...
Joseph Brodsky (Watermark)
He's already tan, and leaning on the rail in his yellow linen shirt, with the pure glory of Venice racing behind him, I think he looks like someone I'd like to run off with, if I already hadn't.
Frances Mayes (Bella Tuscany)
The right, indeed, is indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their energies in that contention, and lose their honour. Sooner or later the submerged nation rises again to the surface; Greece is still Greece and Italy, Italy... The theft of a people can never be justified. These august swindles have no future. A nation cannot be shaped as though it were a pocket handkerchief.
Victor Hugo
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.
Joseph Brodsky
I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?
Tad Williams (The Dirty Streets of Heaven (Bobby Dollar, #1))
I like fire and water. You are lucky to have both right here.” From " Desperate Pursuit in Venice" Chapter Two. Kataryna's response to Luca.
Karynne Summars (Desperate Pursuit in Venice (#1))
He is a proper man's picture, but, alas, who can converse with a dumb-show? How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany and his behaviour everywhere.
William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)
And across the water, you would swear you could sniff it all; the cinnamon and the cloves, the frankincense and the honey and the licorice, the nutmeg and citrons, the myrrh and the rosewater from Persia in keg upon keg. You would think you could glimpse, heaped and glimmering, the sapphires and the emeralds and the gauzes woven with gold, the ostrich feathers and the elephant tusks, the gums and the ginger and the coral buttons mynheer Goswin the clerk of the Hanse might be wearing on his jacket next week. . . . The Flanders galleys put into harbor every night in their highly paid voyage from Venice, fanned down the Adriatic by the thick summer airs, drifting into Corfu and Otranto, nosing into and out of Sicily and round the heel of Italy as far as Naples; blowing handsomely across the western gulf to Majorca, and then to the north African coast, and up and round Spain and Portugal, dropping off the small, lucrative loads which were not needed for Bruges; taking on board a little olive oil, some candied orange peel, some scented leather, a trifle of plate and a parrot, some sugar loaves.
Dorothy Dunnett (Niccolò Rising (The House of Niccolò, #1))
My favourite setting is Italy, specifically Venice, because it is there that I met my husband, who is Venetian. I used it as the setting for Virtue and Vice, Enchantment in Venice, and Seduced by Innocence. Apart from Venice, my favourite city is Rome.
Lucy Gordon
Le poison de Venise, c’est la féerie d’une architecture de songe dans la douceur d’une atmosphère de soie ; ce sont les trésors des siècles, amassés là par une race de marchands et de pirates, la magnificence de l’Orient et de l’ancienne Byzance miraculeusement alliée à la grâce de l’art italien, les mosaïques de Saint-Marc et le revêtement rosé du palais ducal ; le poison de Venise, c’est la solitude de tant de palais déserts, le rêve des lagunes, le rythme nostalgique des gondoles, le grandiose de tant de ruines ; dans des colorations de perles —perles roses à l’aurore et noires au crépuscule —, le charme de tristesse et de splendeur de tant de gloires irrémédiablement disparues ; et dans le plus lyrique décor dont se soit jamais enivré le monde, la morbide langueur d’une pourriture sublime.
Jean Lorrain (Pelléastres (French Edition))
I remember one day - the day I had to leave after a month here alone. I had just had lunch in some small tratoria on the remotest part of the Fondamente Nuove, grilled fish and half a bottle of wine. With that inside, I set out for the place I was staying, to collect my bags and catch a vaporetto. I walked a quarter of a mile along the Fondamente Nuove, a small moving dot in that gigantic watercolor, and then turned right by the hospital of Giovanni e Paolo. The day was warm, sunny, the sky blue, all lovely. And with my back to the Fondamente and San Michele, hugging the wall of the hospital, almost rubbing it with my left shoulder and squinting at the sun, I suddenly felt : I am a cat. A cat that has just had a fish. Had anyone addressed me at that moment, I would have meowed. I was absolutely, animally happy. Twelve hours later, of course, having landed in New York, I hit the worst possible mess in my life - or the one that appeared that way at the time. Yet the cat in me lingered; had it not been for the cat, I'd be climbing the walls now in some expensive institution.
Joseph Brodsky (Watermark)
Why, then, do you go there at such a season?" my editor asked me once, sitting in a Chinese restaurant in New York, with his gay English charges. "Yes, why do you ?" they echoed their prospective benefactor. "What is it like there in winter ?" I thought of telling them about acqua alta; about the various shades of gray in the window as one sits for breakfast in one's hotel, enveloped by silence and the mealy morning pall of newlyweds' faces; about pigeons accentuating every curve and cornice of the local Baroque in their dormant affinity for architecture; about a lonely monument to Francesco Querini and his two huskies carved out of Istrian stone, similar, I think, in its hue, to what he saw last, dying, on his ill-fated journey to the North Pole, now listening to the Giardini's rustle of evergreens in the company of Wagner and Carducci; about a brave sparrow perching on the bobbing blade of a gondola against the backdrop of a sirocco-roiled damp infinity. No, I thought, looking at their effete but eager faces; no, they won't do. "Well, I said, "it's like Greta Garbo swimming.
Joseph Brodsky (Watermark)
Yeah, take it from me. He may try to sell himself to you along with the company. And then there is Roberto, the CEO of our acquisition target. He also seems to be a bit of a flirt. Those two are like moths around a light bulb with you. Any idea how you would react if they both came after you?
Karynne Summars (Desperate Pursuit in Venice (#1))
[T]his jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable chill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he still could, he discovered that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed; but it was so difficult to enter into a state of duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt, took the glasses from his nose and wiped them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy sleeper in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long and which he had vowed not to allow to slip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell.
Marcel Proust (Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu, #1))
It was like a Stygian plain, like a vision of Hades: a land of shadows, vapours and water. Everything was going misty and disappearing like spirits. The moon was enchanting and pulling at the plain just as she enchants and pulls at the sea, drinking all that vast earthly dampness from the horizon with her silent, insatiable throat.
Gabriele d'Annunzio (The Flame)
That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer. This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.
Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History)
A tear can be shed in this place on several occasions. Assuming that beauty is the distribution of light in the fashion most congenial to one's retina, a tear is an acknowledgment of the retina's, as well as the tear's, failure to retain beauty. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. It is the deterioration of the greater speed to the lesser that moistens one's eye. Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feel final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever. For leaving is banishment of the eye to the provinces of the other senses; at best, to the crevices and crevasses of the brain. For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil. Likewise, disappearance of the beloved, especially a gradual one, causes grief no matter who, and for what peripatetic reason, is actually in motion. As the world goes, this city is the eye's beloved. After it, everything is a letdown. A tear is the anticipation of the eye's future.
Joseph Brodsky (Watermark)
The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.
Edward Gibbon (Autobiographies; printed verbatim from hitherto unpublished MSS., with an introd. by the Earl of Sheffield. Edited by John Murray)
Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer...and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl.
M.F.K. Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf)
But the daily tasks and prayers of men, the ancient city tired from having lived too long, the ravaged marble and worn out bells, all those things oppressed by the weight of memories, all those perishable things were rendered humble in comparison with the tremendous blazing Alps that tore at the sky with their thousand unyielding spikes, a vast, solitary city that was waiting, perhaps, for a new race of Titans.
Gabriele d'Annunzio (The Flame)
Titian, who painted the living man of action, the man of parts, susceptible alike to the appreciation of ideal beauty and heroic impulse, but guided withal by expediency, reflected this more practical aspect of life. In his portraiture he expressed the statecraft for which Italians found opportunity beyond the Alps, since in Italy it was denied them; and Titian found even Venice too narrow for the scope of his art.
Leonardo da Vinci (Thoughts on Art and Life)
The eye in this city acquires an autonomy similar to that of a tear. The only difference is that it doesn't sever itself from the body but subordinates it totally. After a while - on the third or fourth day here- the body starts to regard itself as merely the eye's carrier, as a kind of submarine to its now dilating, now squinting periscope. Of course, for all its targets, its explosions are invariably self-inflicted: it's own heart, or else your mind, that sinks; the eye pops up to the surface. This, of course, owes to local topography, to the streets - narrow, meandering like eels - that finally bring you to a flounder of a campo with a cathedral in the middle of it, barnacled with saints and flaunting its Medusa-like cupolas. No matter what you set out for as you leave the house here, you are bound to get lost in these long, coiling lanes and passageways that beguile you to see them through to follow them to their elusive end, which usually hits water, so that you can't even call it a cul-de-sac. On the map this city looks like two grilled fish sharing a plate, or perhaps like two nearly overlapping lobster claws ( Pasternak compared it to a swollen croissant); but it has no north, south, east, or west; the only direction it has is sideways. It surrounds you like frozen seaweed, and the more you dart and dash about trying to get your bearings, the more you get lost. The yellow arrow signs at intersections are not much help either, for they, too, curve. In fact, they don't so much help you as kelp you. And in the fluently flapping hand of the native whom you stop to ask for directions, the eye, oblivious to his sputtering, A destra, a sinistra, dritto, dritto, readily discerns a fish.
Joseph Brodsky (Watermark)
Aboard the gondola, Giacomo Foscarini sat facing Mathias. They were crossing the Canal Grande, then they would navigate around San Marco and return. Foscarini loved to travel around Venice this way. They stopped briefly at a mooring near the bridge to the Rialto, and Foscarini had a servant fetch green olives, fresh Piacenza cheese, a few sausages from Modena, and wine that had just been delivered from Crete. The nobleman often dined aboard his gondola, looking out over the city, watching his world. "Seen from this vantage point, Venice doesn't seem like it's in any of its terrible troubles at all magister," said Foscarini.
Riccardo Bruni (The Lion and the Rose)
century. The most visible legacy of the wealth and splendor generated by the medieval spice trade still dazzles the eye today in Venice, whose grand palazzi and magnificent public architecture were built largely on profits from pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves. A hundred pounds of nutmeg, purchased in medieval Alexandria for ten ducats, might easily go for thirty or fifty ducats on the wharves of Venice. Even after payments for shipping, insurance, and customs duties at both ends, profits well in excess of 100 percent were routine; a typical Venetian galley carried one to three hundred tons between Egypt and Italy and earned vast fortunes for the imaginative and the lucky. During the medieval period, a corpulent Croesus was called a “pepper sack,” not a thoroughgoing insult, since the price of a bag of pepper was usually higher than that of a human being.
William J. Bernstein (A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World)
Why, then, do you go there at such a season?" my editor asked me once, sitting in a Chinese restaurant in New York, with his gay English charges. "Yes, why do you ?" they echoed their prospective benefactor. "What is it like there in winter ?" I thought of telling them about acqua alta; about the various shades of gray in the window as one sits for breakfast in one's hotel, enveloped by silence and the mealy morning pall of newlyweds' faces; about pigeons accentuating every curve and cornice of the local Baroque in their dormant affinity for architecture; about a lonely monument to Francesco Querini and his two huskies carved out of Istrian stone, similar, I think, in its hue, to what he saw last, dying, on his ill-fated journey to the North Pole, now listening to the Giardini's rustle of evergreens in the company of Wagner and Carducci; about a brave sparrow perching on the bobbing blade of a gondola against the backdrop of a sirocco-roiled damp infinity. No, I thought, looking at their effete but eager faces; no, they won't do. "We;;, I said, "it's like Greta Garbo swimming.
Joseph Brodsky (Watermark)
it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
Lella York, the self-proclaimed queen of passive-aggressive behavior. [Lella's perceptive view of herself]
Maria Grazia Swan (Death Under the Venice Moon (Lella York, #2))
Mom, you know what? I just realized you have a knack for making people disappear. [Lella's son catches on!]
Maria Grazia Swan (Death Under the Venice Moon (Lella York, #2))
Venice’s Hosteria all’Ombra,
John Petralia (Not in a Tuscan Villa: During a year in Italy, a New Jersey couple discovers the true Dolce Vita when they trade rose-colored glasses for 3Ds)
A ruler of the waters and their powers: And such she was; her daughters had their dowers From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East Pour’d in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. In purple was she rob’d, and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deem’d their dignity increas’d. In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more, And silent rows the songless gondolier; Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And music meets not always now the ear: Those days are gone—but Beauty still is here. States fall, arts fade—but Nature doth not die, Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear, The pleasant place of all festivity, The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy! —GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Tasha Alexander (Death in the Floating City (Lady Emily, #7))
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Italyluxuary
I intend to marry her,” he said, without turning around. “Not if I have any say in it.” “What makes you think she will listen to you? You have nothing to offer her. I have enough funds to provide for a wife and family. I could take her to Italy, to Venice. She could perform with the best musicians in the world.” “You are not marrying her.” “How are you going to stop me?” “You will have to walk over my corpse. --Farewell My Life, Buona Notte Vita Mia
Cynthia Sally Haggard (Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia)
Opening European Trade with Asia Marco Polo was an Italian merchant whose travels introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. In the 13th century the traditional trade route leading to China was overland, traveling through the Middle East from the countries of Europe. Marco Polo established this trade route but it required ships to carry the heavy loads of silks and spices. Returning to Italy after 24 he found Venice at war with Genoa. In 1299, after having been imprisoned, his cell-mate recorded his experiences in the book “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Upon his release he became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Henry the Navigator charted the course from Portugal to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa and is given credit for having started the Age of Discoveries. During the first half of the 15th century he explored the coast of West Africa and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, in search of better routes to Asia. Five years after Columbus discovered the West Indies, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern point of Africa and discovered a sea route to India. In 1497, on his first voyage he opened European trade with Asia by an ocean route. Because of the immense distance around Africa, this passage became the longest sea voyage made at the time.
Hank Bracker
Tyrone, after wandering with his family through France, the Netherlands, and Germany, finally took up residence in Italy, subsidized by the Pope. Every night, deep in his cups, he would brag that come Hell or high water he would die in Ireland. In 1616 the great rebel O’Neill passed away, a frustrated exile, in Venice.   T
Robin Maxwell (The Wild Irish: A Novel of Elizabeth I and the Pirate O'Malley)
Italy – Venice, Rome, Vatican City.
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
There are also examples of petrified wood occurring as a mere product of nature — even without the heat! As an example, Dr. Andrew Snelling recounts: From the other side of the world comes a report of the chapel of Santa Maria of Health (Santa Maria de Salute), built in 1630 in Venice, Italy, to celebrate the end of The Plague. Because Venice is built on water saturated clay and sand, the chapel was constructed on 180,000 wooden pilings to reinforce the foundations. Even though the chapel is a massive stone block structure, it has remained firm since its construction. How have the wooden pilings lasted over 360 years? They have petrified! The chapel now rests on “stone” pilings!
Ken Ham (A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter)
Marco Polo’s father, Niccolò Polo, traded with the Persians who were known to the early Europeans. These early Persians came from the province of Fârs, sometimes known in Old Persian as Pârsâ, located in the southwestern region of Iran. As a people, they were united under the Achaemenid Dynasty in the 6th century BC, by Cyrus the Great. In 1260, Niccolò Polo and his brother Maffeo lived in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. After the Mongol conquest of Asia Minor, the Polo brothers liquidated their assets into tangible valuables such as gold and jewels and moved out of harm’s way. Having heard of advanced eastern civilizations the brothers traveled through much of Asia, and even met with the Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who later became emperor of China and established the Yuan Dynasty. Not being the first to travel east of Iran, they had heard numerous stories regarding the riches to be discovered in the Far East. Twenty-four years later in 1295, after traveling almost 15,000 miles, they returned to Venice with many riches and treasures. The Polo brothers had experienced a quarter century of adventures on their way to Asia that were later transcribed into The Book of Marco Polo by a writer named Rustichello, who came from Pisa in Tuscany, Italy. This was the beginning of a quest that motivated explorers, including Christopher Columbus, from that time on.
Hank Bracker
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. Alvise
Marie Ohanesian Nardin (Beneath the Lion's Wings)
Hills, Helen. Invisible City: Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents. Oxford University Press. Hollingsworth, Mary. The Cardinal’s Hat. Profile Books. Horne, P. “Reformation and Counter-Reformation at Ferrara” (essay). Italian Studies, 1958. Hufton, Olwen H, editor. Women in Religious Life. European University Institute. Kendrick, Robert. Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan. Clarendon Press. Laven, Mary. Virgins of Venice. Viking Press. Le Goff, Jacques. The Medieval Imagination. University of Chicago Press. Lowe, Kate. Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy. Cambridge University Press. Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman. Cambridge University Press.
Sarah Dunant (Sacred Hearts)
For years, in between our short trips overseas, my husband Dave and I started talking about a different kind of trip, a long-term trip. Both of us loved the food, wine, and people of Italy, and we began talking/dreaming about someday living in Italy for an entire year. We named this dream our Beautiful Dream—our “Bel Sogno.
Pam Saylor
Welcome to Holland.” Written by Emily Perl Kingsley, the parent of a child with Down syndrome, it’s about the experience of having your life’s expectations turned upside down: When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
The European Union is the biggest fraud in world history; it was created to capture all European land and resources by four power-hungry countries: the UK, Germany, France, and Italy. Small European Countries People are just happy that they can roam freely in Paris, Venice, and Berlin, but they have no idea how their governments are paying for this by mortgaging their sovereignty. They are not free nations but a modern-era colony of four power-hungry nations.
Mohammed Zaki Ansari ("Zaki's Gift Of Love")
Ottoman lands became the center of a new eastern Sephardi diaspora, Christian Europe became the home of a western dispersion. Spanish exiles, as well as conversos who wanted to end the duplicity of their existence as outward Christians, made their way in the fifteenth century to Italy, France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries. Insofar as some of these countries had previously expelled their Jews, the new arrivals set about gingerly, revealing very gradually their Jewish origins and customs in cities from Venice to London. Some of these settings proved more tolerant than others, especially those that had fallen under the arc of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, whose guiding motto of Sola Scriptura indicated a renewed appreciation for the Bible, the Hebrew language, and, in some cases, Jews themselves.
David N. Myers (Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
That's what lay behind the feud under way in the Republic: a battle between different noble family factions in a fight for power. Serving this side or the other was of no interest to Mathias. But the consequences of a Venice under the Pope's direct control weren't at all to his liking. His beloved books would be burned by ignorant, avid priests. Men like Malachia would win. It was the same old struggle. The same fight Gheorg had chosen, the same fight that might take him to Wittenberg. But he wouldn't clear the way for Alexander VI. With what little strength he possessed, even though he was nothing more than a pawn of a chessboard, that extended farther then he could see, Mathias would help those in power smash what had all the makings of a major plot, one designed to overturn the government in power in La Serenissima. And these thoughts allowed the monk to find the first answer to the many question with which he still felt burdened. He and the Borgias did NOT share the same Church.
Riccardo Bruni (The Lion and the Rose)
The Venetian Republic Venice, the island city, did not exist during the height of the Roman Empire. But by 1100, it had become a thriving city-state that controlled the Adriatic coastline. It became the busiest port city in the world, serving as a midway point between Asia and Europe. Goods shipped from one to the other made a stop in Venice’s warehouses. Venice also became an awesome military power. It produced warships in huge numbers. Many ships heading to the Middle East to fight wars left from Venice. The arrival in the Americas of Christopher Columbus, an explorer from Genoa, Italy, who was working for Spain, led to the end of Venice as a great power. European attention now turned to the west and the Americas. Because Venice had no access to the Atlantic Ocean, the city’s economy began to decline.
Jean Blashfield Black (Italy (Enchantment of the World Second Series))
Tourism Tourism is the largest segment of the Italian economy. Millions of Italians work in the tourist industry. They work in hotels and restaurants. They drive taxis and lead tour groups. Tourists flock to Italy for its gorgeous scenery, beautiful weather, and incredible art. Italy if the fifth most visited nation in the world, welcoming about forty million tourists each year. One major destination is the Italian Riviera, which draws visitors with its beautiful beaches, sunny days, and cool nights. Many tourists head to Rome to see its ancient ruins and magnificent art. Tuscany is also rich in art and appealing landscapes. Twenty million people travel to Venice every year to experience the charms of a city that has canals instead of roads.
Jean Blashfield Black (Italy (Enchantment of the World Second Series))
Italy has been a single, united country only since 1870. For many centuries before this, it was a collection of independent “city states.” Each city state was based on a main city, such as Venice, Florence, or Milan, and had its own customs and language. Even today, many people think of themselves first and foremost as Venetians (from Venice), or Florentines, or Sicilians, and only then as Italians.
Marilyn Tolhurst (Italy (People & Places))
Celebrations Christmas is Italy’s biggest holiday. Stores decorate in gold, silver, red, and white. At home, many people celebrate Christmas Eve with a huge feast, often featuring fish. The Christmas season in Italy lasts until Epiphany, January 6, the date when the Three Wise Men are said to have reached Jesus’s manger. Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas, is mainly a northern European traditional figure, but one that Italians now often celebrate. Traditionally, Italian children become excited about a different gift-giving figure--Befana, whose name comes from the Italian word for Epiphany, Epifania. Befana as supposedly a woman who meant to go with the Wise Men but was too busy. She planned to see them on their way back, but they returned by a different route. Since then, each year on Epiphany, she busily searches for them, riding on a broomstick and bringing gifts. Children dress in costumes like Befana and go to neighboring houses, where they receive small gifts such as fruit and nuts. At the end of the Befana celebration, Befana figures are burned in a bonfire to get rid of the old year and start the new year fresh. Another major festival is Carnevale. It is a huge festival celebrated in the last week before Lent, a serious forty-day period that precedes Easter. Italy’s biggest Carnevale celebration is in Venice, where people dress in dazzling costumes and parade around the city. Though the costumes often feature somber masks, Carnevale is a time for giddy fun. Children run about throwing confetti. Shopkeepers pass out snacks in the city’s squares. Music fills the air. Like Italy itself, it is a feast for the senses.
Jean Blashfield Black (Italy (Enchantment of the World Second Series))
The most famous ice cream shop in Italy, and now the oldest continuously operated café in the world, was Florian in Piazza San Marco in Venice. It was opened in 1720.
Mark Kurlansky (Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas)
Radian. The prisoner's name is Radiana. Who is keeping her prisoner? Time, Stelio. Time is guarding the doors with his scythe and his hour-glass, as in all those old prints...
Gabriele d'Annunzio (The Flame)
Shall we go get gelato to celebrate?” Stu asks. “Yeah! Gelato!” Andi says enthusiastically. “We’ve been eating gelato all over Italy, haven’t we, Stu? What’s the best place to get some in Venice?” “Near here, it is Gelato Fantasy,” Luca says. “I can take you.” “Don’t you need to get back to the airport?” Evan says, the first time he’s spoken since Luca and Kelly got out of the water taxi. “I mean, if you’ve got somewhere you need to be…” Luca turns to flash him the most dazzling of smiles, pushing back his black hair with his long pale fingers. “Ma no!” he says, so charmingly that I know he’s being totally fake. “Per niente! Now it is too late, my flight has gone. And I am very happy to show you all where to find some good gelato. Andiamo!” “Wow,” Andi sighs as Luca leads us into the piazza. “Luca’s hot. I mean, I love you, Stu, but that’s just how I pictured Italian men. So handsome and sophisticated.” “He’s a prince, too!” Paige says enthusiastically. “Oh my God, you’re kidding!” Andi exclaims. “Kelly, you got rescued by a prince! That’s crazy!” “I was so lucky he was at the airport,” Kelly says in heartfelt tones. “I don’t know what I’d’ve done without him.” “We’d have turned up!” I say, for some reason finding it almost intolerable to hear Luca praised to the skies. “Kendra would’ve got a taxi, and we’d have come and found you. You would’ve been okay.” “I’m just saying he was really nice,” Kelly says quietly to me.
Lauren Henderson (Kissing in Italian (Flirting in Italian, #2))
Hey,” Andi says as we pass the Alilaguna stop on our way back to Piazza San Marco. “I just figured out what ‘Alilaguna’ means: ‘Wings of the Lagoon.’ I love that! Doesn’t it sound like a romance novel?” “Totally!” Paige agrees enthusiastically. “Wings of the Lagoon!” Andi continues. “A beautiful American girl comes to Venice in the nineteenth century and gets swept away by a handsome gondolier…” “Only her rich and powerful parents are way too snobby to allow them to date…,” Kendra chimes in. “So they run away together in the gondola,” Andi says, “but get caught up in a terrible storm…” “And her parents think they’re dead…,” Kendra adds. “So they send out a search party and find them floating in the gondola, arms wrapped around each other,” Kelly suggests. “Still alive, but barely…” “And the parents forgive her and say they can be together…,” Andi says. “And then it turns out he’s the son of a Venetian duke who was going to have an arranged marriage, but he ran away to be a gondolier ’cause he wanted to find a girl who loved him for himself…” Kelly’s voice is getting stronger and more confident. “And they both live happily ever after!” Paige carols happily. “I love this story!” She, Kelly, Andi, and Kendra exchange high fives. “It’s nice when a story has a happy ending,” Luca says softly in my ear. I hadn’t realized he was so close to me. “In real life, it’s not so easy…” I swallow hard at the sound of his voice, at his words. All I can do is shake my head vehemently. No. It’s not so easy. You come to Italy and meet the son of a Florentine prince and you don’t live happily ever after. Not at all.
Lauren Henderson (Kissing in Italian (Flirting in Italian, #2))
Well, he'd gone this far, animated by nothing more noble than curiosity, he told himself as he studied the face of the man in the mirror, pushing his collar down over his neatly knotted tie. The man's mind slipped into English: The cat's got your tongue. Curiosity killed the cat. To stay in vein, the man in the mirror gave a Cheshire smile, and Brunetti left the house.
Donna Leon (The Golden Egg (Commissario Brunetti, #22))