Italian Journeys |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
ancient Antonino Arquà Bassano beautiful Blue Grotto boat Bologna boys caffè Capri carriage castle church Cimbri Cimbrian Civita Vecchia Conservatorio Count Giovanni custodian diligence door doubt driver Eccellenza Ecelino English eyes face feel feet Ferrara Follonica frescos friends gallery garden gate gave Genoa gentle German girls Grossetto Grotto ground hand Herculaneum hills interest Italian Italy ladies land living looked lovely marble mountain Naples Neapolitan never night once Padua painted palaces Parma passed patriarch Petrarch Piazza picturesque plain pleasant poet poet's Pompeii poor Portici Possagno prison road Roman Rome roof ruins scene seemed seen Signor steamer Stella d'Oro stone stood strangers streets sweet talk Tasso theatre thing thought tion tomb took town Trieste turned Venetian Venice Verona Vicenza village walk walls whole wonder young
Popular passages
Page 57 - Well, he knew it ; he had seen pictures of it ; but he guessed he would n't go ashore. Why not, now he was here ? Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice. And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever setting his foot on that enchanted ground. I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what they thought of Genoa. It must have been in the little streets, impassable...
Page 306 - There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing about in the court ; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both in a small way.
Page 11 - ... of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were as near America as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed ; ' ' you come from America ! Dear God, the world is wide — the world is wide ! " The thought was so paralysing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate...
Page 280 - Hondo," and it had everything in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort ; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house ; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere...
Page 254 - Campanile's appearance in pictures till we stood again at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for endurance, — even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save it from being monstrous to us, — and we were glad to hurry away...
Page 269 - HAST thou seen that lordly castle, That Castle by the Sea? Golden and red above it The clouds float gorgeously. "And fain it would stoop downward To the mirrored wave below; And fain it would soar upward In the evening's crimson glow." "Well have I seen that castle, That Castle by the Sea, And the moon above it standing, And the mist rise solemnly.
Page 126 - They wore their hats at dinner," writes Mr. Howells; "but always went away, after soup, deadly pale." It would be difficult to give in three lines a better picture of unconscious vulgarity than is furnished by this conjunction of abject frailties with impertinent assumptions. And so at Capri, "after we had inspected the ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who had made the excavations, came forth out of a cleft in the rock and received...
Page 264 - ... heard of that fierce wind called the Bora, which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep indoors as much as possible. But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They station a man on one of the mountain-tops, and when he feels the first breath of the Bora,...
Page 308 - Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona ; her lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial, flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred be their rest from pen of mine, Verona ! Nay, while I would fain bring the whole city before my...
Page 96 - ... dininghalls with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls ; the ruinous sites of temples ; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking-houses ; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian drawing water from a well there ; the baths with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bas-reliefs all but unharmed ; around the whole, the city wall crowned with slender poplars ; outside the gates, the long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to...