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Are you looking for amazing quotes about Italy? You have come to the right place!
We LOVE Italy and had such a wonderful trip to Italy with our family. We loved the busy action in Rome, the art in Florence, the magic in Venice, and the beauty when visiting Tuscany. If you are planning a trip or just wanting some inspiration read on!
Literary Italy quotes
- “You know, people come to Italy for all sorts of reasons, but when they sat, it’s for the same two things.”
“What?”
“Love and gelato.”
Love & Gelato
Check out our post on the best gelato in Italy!
- “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 marvellous than the land”
Where Angels Fear to Tread
- If you deconstruct Italy, you will in the end see a grapevine, a tomato and a small boy hammering a shard of marble.”
- “Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.”
- “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. ”
- “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred – and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.
Look at the grande Doumo of Florence – a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men,
I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. “Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don’t you rob your church?”
The Innocents Abroad
- “Maybe the whole of Italy is becoming a sort of Sicily.”
The Day of the Owl
- “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.”
The Forest House
- “There is still one of which you never speak.’
Marco Polo bowed his head.
‘Venice,’ the Khan said.
Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?’
The emperor did not turn a hair. ‘And yet I have never heard you mention that name.’
And Polo said: ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
Invisible Cities
- “My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.”
- “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.”
- “Rome lifts you up but won’t let you settle down – it turns you into a bird without a nest.”
Scorched Earth
- “I love the way Italy makes me feel like I’m home.”
Our Italian Journey: Living our dream in Italy for one year
General Quotes about Italy
- “All of my youth growing up in my Italian family was focused around the table. That’s where I learned about love.”
Leo Buscaglia
- A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.
Samuel Johnson, writer and poet
- “I spent a college semester in a small town in Italy – and that is where I truly tasted food for the first time.”
Alton Brown
- “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.”
- “There is in the DNA of the Italians a bit of madness, which in the overwhelming majority of cases is positive. It is genius. It is talent. It’s the masterpieces of art. It’s the food, fashion, everything that makes Italy great in the world.”
Matteo Renzi
- “Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn’t have Rome. We wouldn’t have Florence. We wouldn’t have the marvel that is Venice.” — Matteo Renzi
- “What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.”
Erica Jong
- “Open my heart and you will see graved inside of it, “Italy.”
Robert Browning
- “It’s easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time.”
Philip Dunne
- “For sure, in Italy, the sun always shines.”
Aleksandar Mitrovic
- “Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can get you a nice little villa in Tuscany, and that’s close enough for me.”
Quotes about Rome
- “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”
Augustus, Roman emperor
- “From the dome of St. Peter’s one can see every notable object in Rome… He can see a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.”
Mark Twain
- “Rome, the city of visible history.”
George Eliot
- “Each, in its own way, was unforgettable. It would be difficult to — Rome! By all means, Rome. I will cherish my visit here in memory as long as I live.”
- “If I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me.”
Anthony Bourdain
Quotes about Venice
- ‘By day, Venice is a city of museums and churches, packed with great art. Linger over lunch, trying to crack a crustacean with weird legs and antennae. At night, when the hordes of day-trippers have gone, another Venice appears. Dance across a floodlit square, glide in a gondola through quiet canals while music echoes across the water. Pretend it’s Carnevale time, don a mask — or just a fresh shirt — and become someone else for a night.’
Rick Steves
- ‘If I were not King of France, I would choose to be a citizen of Venice.’
Henry III
- “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
- “Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.”
- “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”
Truman Capote
Quotes about Florence
- “Among the four old bridges that span the river, the Ponte Vecchio, that bridge which is covered with the shops of jewelers and goldsmiths, is a most enchanting feature in the scene. The space of one house, in the center, being left open, the view beyond, is shown as in a frame; and that precious glimpse of sky, and water, and rich buildings, shining so quietly among the huddled roofs and gables on the bridge, is exquisite”.
Charles Dickens
- “Through these old streets I wander dreamily; Around me Florence sweeps her busy tide of life.”
William Leighton
- “To see the sun sink down, drowned on his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature.”
Mark Twain
Quotes about Tuscany
- “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.”
- “The Tuscan countryside whizzed by in a kaleidoscopic whirl of shapes and colors. Green grass and trees melded with blue sky, purple and yellow wildflowers, peachy-orange villas, brown-and-gray farmhouses, and the occasional red-and-white Autogrill, Italy’s (delicious) answer to fast food.”
- “The sun still beats down warmly over the Sienese countryside in September, and the stubble left by harvest covers the fields with a sort of animal fur. It is one of the most beautiful countrysides in the world: God has drawn the curve of its hills with an exquisite freedom, and has given it a rich and varied vegetation among which the cypresses stand out like lords. Man has worked this earth to advantage and has spread his dwellings over it; but from the most princely villa to the humbles cottage they all have a similar grace and harmony with their ochre walls and curved tiles. The road is never monotonous; it winds and rises, only to descend into another valley between terraced fields and age-old olive groves. Both God and man have shown their genius at Siena.”
I hope this inspires you to visit Italy! If you can find a way to go you won’t be disappointed, around every corner is something else beautiful.
If you go make sure to check out how to pack for 10 days in a carry on!
If you can visit now you may enjoy our Virtual Travel program that will take you to Italy.
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