Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, bei...ng absolutely necessary to excel in either; which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two--a proof of the decline of that country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been b...rought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Opera once was an important social instrument--especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together... and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most ...enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a d...esk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.... The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, The next in majesty, in both the last: The force of Nature could no farther go; To make a third she joined the former two.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »