Italian Backgrounds

For nearly an hour we skirted the edge of this basin of hills, in sight of the ancient city on its livid cliff; then we turned into a gentler country, through woods starred with...

Yet, though one feels that this new spirit has tamed the desert, and transplanted to it enough of the leaven of human intercourse to exorcise its evil spirits, the imagination r...

There are gardens everywhere, gardens of all kinds and classes, from the peasant’s hut hedged with pink geraniums to the villa with its terraced sub-tropical growths; but most w...

Toward sunset we reached Madonna di Tirano, the great pilgrimage church of the Valtelline. With its adjoining monastery it stands alone in poplar-shaded meadows a mile or more f...

The church, with its dignified front and sculptured portal, adjoins the hospice, and shows little of interest within but the stone grotto containing the venerated image of Saint...

In Rome, on the contrary, in Milan, and to some extent in Venice, as well as in many of the smaller towns throughout Italy, there is a sharp line of demarcation between the guid...

To the mind curious in contrasts--surely one of the chief pleasures of travel--there can be no better preparation for a descent into Italy than a sojourn among the upper Swiss v...

Now the sentiment that Correggio embodied is one which, from the present point of view, seems to lack the preserving essence of sincerity. It is true that recent taste has retur...

Italy offers little, and Milan least of all, to satisfy these requirements. The Latin ideal demanded space, order, and nobility of composition. But does it follow that picturesq...

The work of both is invaluable as a “document” for the study of eighteenth-century Venice; but while Canaletto in his charming canvases represented only the superficial and obvi...