“In Italy for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Orson Welles
“Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.”
Bertrand Russell
“You may have the universe if I may have Italy”
Giuseppe Verdi
“Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building after seeing Italy.”
Fanny Burney
“The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy.”
Thomas Paine
“Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.”
Erica Jong
“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”
Samuel Johnson
