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Top 10: Famous quotes about Italy

Top 10: Famous quotes about Italy

Italy has been a source of inspiration for many a traveller for centuries. From Lord Byron to George Clooney, here are ten quotes about the country from some of the peninsula’s most famous visitors.

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<b>Samuel Johnson, English essayist:</b> "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."Photo: Joshua Reynolds/Tate Gallery
<b>D.H. Lawrence, English novelist:</b> "And that is ... how they are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other's face." Photo: Beinecke Rare Book &amp; Manuscript Library, Yale University
<b>Thomas Mann, German novelist:</b> "This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism."Photo: Shutterstock
<b>Orson Welles, American actor, director and writer:</b> "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."Photo: Shutterstock
<b>Lord Byron, English poet:</b> "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand; I saw from out the wave of her structure's rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble pines, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles." Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 1).Photo: Shutterstock
<b>George Clooney, American actor:</b> "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."Photo: Angela George
<b>Nicholas Cage, American actor:</b> "It's a family that's loaded with grudges and passion. We come from a long line of robbers and highwaymen in Italy, you know. Killers, even."Photo: Gerald Geronimo/Wikicommons
<b>Vivienne Westwood, English fashion designer:</b> "In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don't understand."Photo: Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP
<b>Christian Lacroix, French fashion designer:</b> "In Italy, the Milanese are well organized but follow bourgeois taste. They adhere to certain codes of elegance, but not to individualism."Photo: Florian Vincent/Wikicommons
<b>John Lydon, English lead singer of The Sex Pistols:</b> "Move to Italy. I mean it: they know about living in debt; they don't care. I stayed out there for five months while I was making a film called 'Order Of Death,' and they've really got it sussed. Nice cars. Sharp suits. Great food. Stroll into work at 10. Lunch from 12 till three. Leave work at five. That's living!"Photo: Shell Smith/Wikicommons


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