Italian Journeys, Volume 1 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Antonino Arquà Austrian Bassano beautiful believe Blue Grotto boat Bologna boys caffè Capri castle centuries church Cimbri Cimbrian Civita Vecchia custodian diligence door doubt driver Ducal Duke Eccellenza Ecelino Emperor English eyes face feet Ferrara Follonica French frescos friends garden gate gave Genoa gentle German girls Giulio Giulio Romano Gonzaga grace Grossetto Grotto hand Herculaneum hills Italian Journeys Italy ladies land lived look lord Mantua marble Marquis mountain Naples Neapolitan never night once Padua painted palace Parma passed Petrarch Piazza picturesque pleasant poet Pompeii poor Pope prince prison road Roman Rome roof ruin scarcely scene seemed seen Signor Sordello steamer Stella d'Oro stone stood streets Tasso theatre thing thought tion tomb took town travellers Trieste turned Venetian Venice Verona Vicenza village walls whole wonder young
Popular passages
Page 9 - ... 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 slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear. Europe is material : I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American...
Page 49 - Well, he knew it ; he had seen pictures of it ; but he guessed he wouldn'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 65 - Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave To each, but whoso did receive of them...
Page 204 - Frigida Francisci tegit hie lapis ossa Petrarcae. Suscipe, virgo parens, animam : sate virgine, parce, Fessaque jam terris, coeli requiescat in arce.
Page 227 - ... things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting, but, as usual, it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which travellers view objects of interest Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, skilfully preserving its equilibrium, as we went, by an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the Campanile's appearance...
Page 240 - 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 179 - ... with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be ; a blessed benching goes round the wall, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours...
Page 110 - 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 298 - He was properly the first lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have died with him in 1284. The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the Inferno had been...
Page 99 - Here — where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires in the awful similitude of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and showered its destroying petals all abroad — was it not tragic to find again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the earth's immortal life ? Of them that planted and tended and plucked and bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children of the summer, what witness...