Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Italy
For whereso’er I turn my ravished eyes,
Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise;
Poetic fields encompass me around,
And still I seem to tread on classic ground.
Addison—Letter from Italy.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary’s saying serves for me—
(When fortune’s malice
Lost her Calais)—
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, “Italy.”
Robert Browning—Men and Women. “De Gustibus.”
Italia, Italia, O tu cui feo la sorte,
Dono infelice di bellezza, ond’ hai
Funesta dote d’infiniti guai
Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte.
Italia! O Italia! thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty, which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past,
On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough’d by shame,
And annals graved in characters of flame.
Vicenzo Filicaja—Italia. English rendering by Byron—Childe Harold. Canto IV. St. 42.
Beyond the Alps lies Italy.
J. W. Foley—Graduation Time. Expression found in Livy—Ab Urbe. Bk. 21. 30.
L’Italie est un nom geographique.
Italy is only a geographical expression.
Prince Metternich to Lord Palmerston, 1847. See his Letter to Count Prokesch-Osten, Nov. 19, 1819. Correspondence of Prokesch. II. 313. First used by Metternich in his Memorandum to the Great Powers, Aug. 2, 1814.
Gli Italiani tutti ladroni.
All Italians are plunderers.
Napoleon Bonaparte when in Italy. Non tutti, ma buona parte. Not all but a good part.—Response by a lady who overheard him. See Coleridge—Biographia Literaria. Satyrane’s Letters. No. 2. (Ed. 1870). I Francesci son tutti ladri—Non tutti—ma buona parte.—Pasquin when the French were in possession of Rome. See Catherine Taylor’s Letters from Italy. Vol. I. P. 239. (Ed. 1840). Quoted also by Charlotte Eaton—Rome in the Nineteenth Cent. Vol. II. P. 120. (Ed. 1852).
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Poe—Helen.
My soul to-day
Is far away
Sailing the Vesuvian Bay.
T. B. Read—Drifting.