Italian woman

“ It would be too much to say, that if there is any thing of which a genuine Italian has a horror, it is of cleanliness; or that if there is any thing which seems ridiculous to a thorough-bred Italian woman, it is modesty: but certainly the degree to which nicety is carried by some people is a bore to an Italian imagination, as the excess of delicacy which is pretended or practised by some women is quite incomprehensible to the females of the South. ”

“ He has incarnated the incomparable charm of the Italian woman, the most graceful, the most impassioned, the most seductive woman on earth, although also perhaps the most imperious, pitiless, and fiercely exacting in her passions. ”

“ Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even if only potential, I do believe I could love her, even to the Day of Judgment, like any Oliverotto da Narni, or Frangipani or Prinzivalle. ”

“ Such simplicity and sincerity as are apparent in this real affection of the king and queen for each other cannot fail to have a widespread influence.
The modern Italian woman is not an easy person to describe, as it would be difficult to find one who might serve as a type for all the rest. In general, it may be said that they are not so well educated as the women in many other countries, and that so long as a woman is devout, and at the same time domestic in her tastes, she is considered to possess the most essential requisites of character and attainment. ”

“ But it was during the Renaissance that the remarkable flowering of the intellect of the Italian woman was seen at its best. While the women in the other parts of Europe, especially in England and Germany, were suffering the ill effects consequent on the suppression of the convents, which, for [Pg 58] centuries, had been almost the only schools available for girls, the women of Italy were taking an active part in the great educational movement inaugurated by the revival of learning, and winning the highest honors for their sex in every department of science, art and literature. ”

“ I have often heard it asserted, that Italian women have remarkable powers of attaching their lovers. Those powers, whatever they are, do not seem to depend entirely on personal charms, as many of them retain their ancient influence over their lovers after their beauty is much in the wane, and they themselves are considerably advanced in the vale of years. I know an Italian nobleman, of great fortune, who has been [419] lately married to a very beautiful young woman, and yet he continues his assiduity to his former mistress, now an old woman, as punctually as ever. ”

“ A young Abruzzese servant—from the most saving population of Italy—became enthusiastic when recounting the virtues of his proposed bride to his mistress, which culminated with: "Signorina mia, è piena di biancheria"—"she is full of house linen."
There is among all Italian women more dignity in their relations with men than there is among English women. The Italian woman has a noble reticence, a power of self-protection, which imposes itself on lover and husband. ”

“ In the arts of sculpture and painting the women of Italy, during the Renaissance, were no less illustrious than they were in science, literature and philosophy. Indeed, many of the treasures in the Italian churches and art galleries that still delight all lovers of the beautiful are from the chisel and the brush of women who achieved distinction between three and four centuries ago. ”

“ This is only one among the many instances of the extraordinary restraint exercised in Italy upon the freedom of unmarried women. A girl of fifteen, if married, is at liberty to walk about alone, while I have known a woman of forty—the only Italian old maid, by the by, it has been my lot to meet—who was not allowed to move a step without at least one trusty servant as her body-guard. ”

“ The Italian women, as we have already seen, had commanded marked recognition for their talents and learning even before the close of the Middle Ages. The most famous of these were among those who, having obtained the doctorate, became lecturers and professors in the great university of Bologna. The existence and accomplishments of some of these may, perhaps, be more or less legendary, but there can be no doubt that many of them, some before the time of the Renaissance, had gained a European reputation for the breadth and variety of their attainments. ”

“ The Italian woman is not a good housekeeper, but she is a homemaker; she does not fret; dirt, disorder, noise, company, never disturb her. She must share everything with those about her. She cooks one meal a day and that at night. ”

“ Mystified by the strange, stolid resistance of the brown-eyed girls to all entreaties, the strike-leaders visited their homes. There they found that the Italian woman, instead of being a free moral agent, is absolutely subject to the will of her nearest male relative, and the man would not take the wife, sister, or daughter out of the shop unless he was well paid for it. ”

“ And contrast the sympathy and encouragement of Italy with the almost brutal opposition which women in our own country encountered when, but a few decades ago, they applied for admittance to the medical schools of New York and Philadelphia. The difference between the Italian and the Anglo-Saxon attitude toward women in the all-important matters in question requires no comment. ”

“ Even young men, of apparently the most frivolous disposition, evince, under these circumstances, a tenderness and forbearance we are apt to consider the exclusive attribute of woman. No Italian, when ill, is ever left alone; his friends seem to think they are bound to devote themselves to him, and divide the hours of watching according to their numbers or the nature of their avocations. ”

“ For even in her flush of beauty, the elder lady, while in the full splendor of Italian womanhood, must ever have been calculated to inspire admiration, not all unmixed with awe, rather than tenderness or love. The daughter, on the other hand, was one whose every gesture, smile, word, glance, bespoke that passion latent in itself, which it awakened in the bosom of all beholders. ”

“ The Renaissance was, indeed, the heydey of the intellectual woman throughout the whole of the Italian peninsula—a time when woman enjoyed the same scholastic freedom as men, and when Mme. de Staël's dictum, Le génie n'a pas de sexe, expressed a doctrine admitted in practice and not an academic theory.
It would require a large volume, or rather many volumes, to do justice to the learned women of Italy who conferred such honor upon their sex during the period we are considering. ”

“ They have neither mind nor education; they scarcely understand what is said to them. In this country criticism does not exist, and I begin to think that the saying is right which attributes to Italian women something too material in love. The only intelligent and educated woman I have met in Italy is La Cortanza of Turin.
I have been to see the Luini frescos at Saronno; they are worthy of their reputation. The one that represents the Marriage of the Virgin is of peculiar sweetness. The faces are angelical, and, what is rare in frescos, the tones are soft and harmonious. ”

“ Such a companion in Venice should of course be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it makes no woman's perceptions less keen to be aware that she can't help looking graceful as she is borne over the waves. ”

“ But whatever she may have been as a mother, she seems to have lacked the talent or the desire to gather about her a lettered society, and the result is seen in the disgraceful orgies of her husband and his clever satellites, with no advantage to the “unhampered intellects” of these poets and savants, but with a decided disadvantage to their manners and morals.
It was during the reign of pure, highly educated, and able women that the Italian courts reached their highest point of power and brilliancy. ”

“ Either her father or mother must have been Italian, I should think, both from her name and her general type, but she knows no Italian whatever—only a simple childish sort of French. She is the only woman I should ever marry if I lived a hundred years, and I want you to do it to-day. ”

“ That which most impresses the student of education during this period of Italian history is not the splendor of art and letters in court and castle, which so dazzled Europe during the time of Renée of Ferrara and Elizabetta Gonzaga of Urbino. We find, it is true, a goodly number of women who won distinction as poets and artists; but it is rather those who were devoted to more serious studies that arrest our attention—women who attained eminence in physical and natural science, in mathematics, in the classical and oriental languages, in philosophy, law and theology. ”

“ The clever Frenchwomen saw their opportunity, and when the courts were sunk in vice and inanities, they drew out of the past its secret of social power, and created the literary salon, which was one of the glories of the golden age of France. The wave of knowledge which had raised the Italian women so high, and then so strangely receded, culminated again in the intellectual brilliancy and unparalleled influence of the Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century. ”

“ The mind of an Italian, whether man or woman, seldom fails, for ought I see, to make up in extent what is wanted in cultivation; and that they possess the art of pleasing in an eminent degree, the constancy with which they are mutually beloved by each other is the best proof.
Ladies of distinction bring with them when they marry, besides fortune, as many clothes as will last them seven years; for fashions do not change here as often as at London or Paris; yet is pin-money allowed, and an attention paid to the wife that no Englishwoman can form an idea of: in every family her duties are few ”

“ He tries to demonstrate that, in the sphere of private life, Italian society gradually refined the brutal lusts of the Middle Ages, and passed through fornication to a true conception of woman as man's companion in the family. ”

“ She was termed a heartless jilt, and her conduct towards Melville was commented on in the severest terms.
In Italy no woman ought to permit any marked attention from one of the opposite sex, if she would preserve an unblemished reputation. The innocent frankness of my countrywomen, and of the American ladies, is liable to be sadly misconstrued by the idle and languid Italian “lions,” who lounge away their time at the doors of the different cafes, and discuss the appearance and character of the ladies, as they pass in their carriages toward the Lungo L’Arno and Cascines. ”

“ Dressed with scrupulous plainness, seldom or never taken into company, rarely appearing out of doors, except for a drive in a close carriage, or to go to mass, or to call on some old female relation—without the advantages of a cultivated mind or literary resources—the condition of our Italian unmarried woman is as cheerless and insignificant as it is possible to conceive. ”

“ The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.
Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. ”

“ It is possible too, that the tendencies and modes of thought of her husband on the subject of Italy may have exercised a repressing influence in this respect on Vittoria's mind; for who does not know how powerfully a woman's intelligence and heart may be elevated or degraded by the nature of the object of her affections ”

“ The education of the woman of the upper class was absolutely the same as that of the man. The Italian of the Renaissance did not for a moment hesitate to give his son and daughter the same literary and philosophical training. He considered the knowledge of the works of antiquity life's greatest good, and he could not, therefore, deny to woman participation in such knowledge. Hence the perfection attained by the daughters of noble families in writing and speaking Latin. ”

“ When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the weather or the hour. She is always interesting and almost always sad ”

“ She was evidently pleased to 60 have her picture taken, as these peasants always are, especially if a few soldi are thrown in to seal the contract. If the picture is good you shall have one, as it will give you a characteristic bit of this Southern Italian life.
Here women young and old are to be seen working in the fields with the men, driving ox-carts, walking beside them, and bearing burdens that seem far too heavy for any woman's shoulders. ”

“ That which the modern reader finds the most surprising in the Italian women of the Renaissance is their enthusiasm for the literæ humaniores—the Latin and Greek classics—and the proficiency which so many of them, even at an early age, attained in the literature and philosophy of antiquity. ”