Italian

“ Italian is a sweet language, and of beautiful simplicity—its literature perhaps the first in the world. The Italians!—wonderful men have sprung up in Italy. Italy is not merely famous for painters, poets, musicians, singers, and linguists—the greatest linguist the world ever saw, the late Cardinal Mezzofanti, was an Italian; but it is celebrated for men—men emphatically speaking: Columbus was an Italian, Alexander Farnese was an Italian, so was the mightiest of the mighty, Napoleon Bonaparte;—but the German language, German literature, and the Germans! ”

“ "It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian, Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders, but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in flood." ”

“ I have now seen but two Italian cities, and for the first time, and have spoken with but few persons, and yet I know my Italians pretty well. They are like courtiers, who consider themselves the first people in the world, and who, on the strength of certain advantages, which cannot be denied them, can indulge with impunity in so comfortable a thought. The Italians appear to me a right good people. Only one must see the children and the common people as I see them now, and can see them, while I am always open to them,—nay, always lay myself open to them. ”

“ Where the Italian has not been dulled, stiffened, corroded, debased by the levelling and impoverishing influences of modern civilisation, there is he always classic, eloquent, ardent, graceful in body and mind ”

“ The Italians are the greatest loungers in the world, and while walking in the fields, or stretched in the shade, seem to enjoy the serenity and genial warmth of [373] their climate with a degree of luxurious indulgence peculiar to themselves. Without ever running into the daring excesses of the English, or displaying the frisky vivacity of the French, or the invincible phlegm of the Germans, the Italian populace discover a species of sedate sensibility to every source of enjoyment, from which, perhaps, they derive a greater degree of happiness than any of the other. ”

“ The beauty of the Italian landscape and the softness of the Italian climate seem naturally fitted to dispose the poetic soul to the dreams of rural life, and the language seems, by its graceful simplicity, peculiarly adapted to express the feelings of a class of people whom we picture to ourselves as ingenuous and infantine in their natures. ”

“ The Italian of our time is too quickly intimidated, forgets too soon, wears the rosette in his button-hole when he should put crape round his arm, dances with too ready an indifference on the grave of his hopes and of his friends. ”

“ He sees everything with feeling, penetrating below the surface with sympathetic insight. Italy gives him his sensuous zest in life. But from France, through his love of her vigor and grace, his cordial admiration of her literature, he has gained a refining and strengthening influence. She has taught him that direct diction, that choice simplicity, which forsakes the stilted Italian of literary tradition for a style far simpler, stronger, and more natural. ”

“ Since the tale of the Drummer-boy has touched your heart, it should be easy for you this morning to do your composition for examination—Why you love Italy—well. Why do I love Italy? Do not a hundred answers present themselves to you on the instant? I love Italy because my mother is an Italian; because the blood that flows in my veins is Italian; because the soil in which are buried the dead whom my mother mourns and whom my father venerates is Italian ”

“ Go to whatever assemblies or SPECTACLES people of fashion go to, and when you are there do as they do. Endeavor to outshine those who shine there the most, get the 'Garbo', the 'Gentilezza', the 'Leggeadria' of the Italians; make love to the most impertinent beauty of condition that you meet with, and be gallant with all the rest. Speak Italian, right or wrong, to everybody; and if you do but laugh at yourself first for your bad Italian, nobody else will laugh at you for it. ”

“ ON THE RIDICULOUS TITLES ASSUMED BY ITALIAN ACADEMIES.
The Italians are a fanciful people, who have often mixed a grain or two of pleasantry and even of folly with their wisdom. This fanciful character betrays itself in their architecture, in their poetry, in their extemporary comedy, and their Improvisatori; but an instance not yet accounted for of this national levity, appears in those denominations of exquisite absurdity given by themselves to their Academies! ”

“ Even below the stature of the average Italian of the South, the large, shapely, and well-poised head, surmounted with thick, closely cropped gray hair brushed pompadour, the sparkling eyes, ruddy face, and genial expression give you at once the feeling that you are in the presence of a man of power, of resourcefulness, and of facility. No one could mistake that he is a man of the people. ”

“ Of all the nations of Europe, I know of none, save Italy, in which the characters are the same in every class and gradation. The appeal you would make to the Italian noble must be the same you would address to the humble peasant on his property. The point of view is invariably identical; the sympathies are always alike. No matter what differences education may have instituted and habits implanted, the nobleman and his lackey think and feel and reason alike. ”

“ If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least more Italian than anything but Italy--more Italian, too, I should think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambéry. ”

“ The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian life;—to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul. ”

“ Whenever you have to do with an Italian, you do not encounter the doltish ignorance of an English clown, nor the dogged sullenness of a German. He takes pleasure in your pleasure, and interests himself in the objects which are exciting your interest, in a manner at once gratifying to us and honourable to himself. ”

“ Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close? For what, in yonder fields, Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods, For other lands Italian swords are drawn! Oh, misery for him who dies in war, Not for his native shores and his beloved, His wife and children dear, But by the foes of others For others' cause, and cannot dying say, “Dear land of mine, The life thou gavest me I give thee back.” ”

“ Italians can do nothing else in the bustling communities of foreign nations. Buttons looked with respect upon those men who thus had carried their lore for their dear Art for years through strange lands and uncongenial climes.
"If I were an Italian I too would be an organ-grinder!" ”

“ Such scattered examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English literary history,—the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy. The bibliography of 16th-century translations from the Italian in the fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. ”

“ The Italians, who live to so great extent by the travel through their country, learn our abominable languages and minister to our detestable comfort and propriety, till we have slight chance to know them as we once could,—musical, picturesque, and full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all uncleanness. ”

“ Defining Italian literature, therefore, so as to comprise whatsoever is written in any dialect of that "soft bastard Latin" which bears the Italian name, and to exclude all compositions in a language which a Roman would have called Latin, we find none among great literatures whose beginnings are more humble and obscure, or, which at first seems surprising, more recent. ”

“ The heat is great in the middle of the day, and I read a great deal to beguile the time, chiefly in Italian; for it is pleasant to imbue one’s mind with the language and literature of the country in which one is living: and poetry—Italian poetry—is in harmony with these scenes. ”

“ For that we met nothing whatever, as I seem at this distance of time to recall, while we gently trotted and trotted through the splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the whole impression--the impression that culminated at last, before the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius. ”

“ One day, near the close of the seventeenth century, a number of ladies and gentlemen—mostly poets and poetesses according to their thinking were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of Rome. As they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and picturesque as they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an ode with the sweet patience of their race,—for they were all Italians,—it occurred to the most conscious man among them that here was something uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had been flattered. ”

“ We have a good little landlady, who can speak nothing but Italian, so that she serves as a parlatrice for us, and awakens our memory of Italian dialogue—a memory which consists chiefly of recollecting Italian words without knowing their meaning, and English words without knowing the Italian for them. ”

“ Now if we call Italian the daughter of Latin, we do not mean to ascribe to Italian a new vital principle. Not a single radical element was newly created for the formation of Italian. Italian is Latin in a new form. Italian is modern Latin, or Latin ancient Italian. The names mother and daughter only mark different periods in the growth of a language substantially the same. ”

“ They love splendour too, and display; and in all their festivals you see something like an effort to recall a time when their cities were the grandest and their citizens the proudest in all Europe.
They are a very difficult people to understand. There are not so many salient points in the Italian as in the German or the Frenchman; his character is not so strongly accented; his traits are finer—his shades of temperament more delicate. ”

“ More than once, as we move about nowadays in the Italian cities, there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the coming years. It represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and prosperous, but altogether scientific and commercial. The Italy indeed that we sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently mercantile country; though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes and altar-pieces more. ”

“ Long ago, even so long ago as in the time of the first great Romans of the Republic, Italians loved the shores of their land, and would flock thither from the middle countries to breathe the stronger, if not always fresher, sea-breeze, and to rest and revel in the clear waters of ebbing waves. ”

“ Italians will continue to show a shining example to the world by reason of their gaiety and charm of character, their mental subtlety, which with time will grow less involved and more lucid in expression, by their art of life, even now not much inferior to the French, by their sensitiveness to beauty, by their capacity for enthusiastic appreciation, and by their technical genius in applied science. ”

“ It always has a welcome for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its long green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already hinted, made me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! ”

“ And the beginnings of the new Italian tongue, liberating itself from the secular thrall of its parent Latin, and having taken shape in its Tuscan and Sicilian matrixes, sought an early literary expression and found it in the work of our perhaps slightly pedantic giullare who will in all probability remain for ever unknown to us. That some such person existed is obvious, even if we cannot discover his name, nor his place of birth, nor estate. ”

“ A Frenchman both varies his accents and gesticulates while he speaks much more than an Englishman, and an Italian a great deal more than either. Musical pronunciations and expressive gesture are, to this day, the distinction of Italy, and this combination of sign and its aid, sound, the latter being notes for its music, make the sweetest and most liquid language in existence. ”

“ I'm afraid this little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It's no small burden for one who likes the Italians--as who doesn't, under this restriction?--to have so much indifference even to rudimentary purifying processes to dispose of. What is the real philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul surfaces merely superficial? If unclean manners have in truth the moral meaning which I suspect in them we must love Italy better than consistency. ”