Italian Fantasies

But I looked in vain, as I came up the hill, for the inscriptions and the frescoes. The sun was lower in the west, but the sunshine had grown even sultrier, the sky even bluer,...

“Patience, Reb Yussef!” said Halphaï. “There is more to come. For, growing yet more swollen in his presumption, Yeshua went to the Holy Temple, and, entering the Court of the Ge...

But if Absolute Poverty is less worshipful than St. Francis imagined, Magnificence as an ideal will, I fear, always be found to connote defective moral sympathies, as of the Pha...

Millions of spiritual creatures may walk the earth unseen, as Milton asserts, and millions more may be invisible in Mars and the remoter seats of the merry-go-round, but _de non...

Pray do not imagine I would endorse Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the popular platitude that truth always lies midway between two extreme views. On the contrary, truth is...

To-day our St. Giulias, in revolt against a social order founded on prostitution and sex-inequality, demand political rights as leverage for a nobler society, and, despite the a...

Here have I been in Italy half a book, and scarcely a page about the Pictures or the “National Monuments.” _Ci vuol pazienza._ I fear you will soon cry “hold enough,” as I have...

The Sacro Catino of Genoa Cathedral once held drops of the blood; a chapel of marble and gold at Turin still preserves in the glow of ever-burning lamps the Santo Sudario, or Ho...

I did not need the lesson of the Scala ballet—Civiltà inspired by Luce and chasing Tenebre. I know that that light is electric. Have I not found it in the deepest crypt of the u...

So _eccomi_ back in Assisi, after heaven knows how many years, and here is the same bland Franciscan—or his brother—to show me the same tiny monastery garden with the same rusty...

Think of the most powerful of the Popes, the head of Christendom, the excommunicator of the Kings of France and Spain, having to succumb to a fever; think of the great French wr...

But mankind has never forgotten its long siesta as a vegetable. Still linked with the world of sleep through the mechanic processes of nutrition, respiration, circulation, consc...

As for land, it is the one thing that I can conceive nationalised even under our present form of Socialism, nay, which is already nationalised to the extent that the private own...

No doubt the inaccessibility of Mount Titan must have been the origin of San Marino’s existence in those dim days of the Diocletian persecution, when the Roman Matron, Felicita,...

Nay, it is often the voice of Machiavelli even when it sounds like the voice of Savonarola. For, as Lord Acton subtly pointed out, Machiavellism lurks in many a seemingly innoce...

A sense of passing through a fantastic dream-world began to steal upon me as I wandered through the Hall of the Zodiac with its great blue roof of stars and celestial signs and...

Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at least until it gets into the hands of the art critic and the programme-concocter. But the truth airily embodied in words...

“Nay; art a barbarian or a worshipper of the Temple of Diana that thou knowest not the Church of the Theotokos, and the great Imperial Council of Bishops that is sitting there t...

To think that missionaries go forth to preach verbal propositions violently torn from the life and the historic enchainment and the art and the atmosphere! If they would but sta...

’Twas not till I had found out for myself that the overwhelming preponderance in Art of the _Crucifixion_, the _Descent from the Cross_, the _Entombment_, and the _Pietà_ were d...

But the Carnival—like St. Valentine’s Day—is dying. It is more alive in the ex-Italian Riviera than in Italy proper. I have a memory of a Carnival at Siena which consisted mainl...

I had regarded the Salute and the other Plague-Churches of Venice as mere historic curiosities, and written it down as an asset of human thought that the Plague of 1630 was due...

And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories, tablets, pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of heroes, records of _plébiscites_ anent annexations, _lo...

But it is only when the corpse has not commanded the monument that I am able to endure its magnificence. The Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato, the poisoned Pope Benedict in P...

Read as a poem of earth, the “Divine” Comedy has for us a value quite other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What we see in it is the complete _Mappam...

But after all there is more fascination in the primitive artistry which knew no differences of Space or Time, no colour but universal—_id est_, Italian—no place _un_like home. T...

The germ of this book may be found in three essays under the same title published in “Harper’s Magazine” in 1903 and 1904, which had the inestimable advantage of being illustrat...

The culture-pilgrim, too, apart from this scattering of popcorn, is a futile being. Culture as a mere excursion from a solid home-reality may be vitalising, but whoso thinks to...

Even in the Dutch and Flemish images of doom I have thought to detect a note of earth-laughter, almost an irresponsible gaiety. Pierre Breughel paints the _Fall of the Angels_ a...

But for aught we know they may have been dispensed in charity. And for aught history can tell us, she may have been as spotless as Desdemona. Gibbon, mark you, is by no means co...

You may say that Virgil, who was neither modern nor British, practised the same attitude of detachment, the same exclusive self-consecration to letters as Wordsworth or Tennyson...

Tintoretto’s Heaven is, in fact, congested beyond any hygienic standard. ’Tis a restless, jostling place, unpleasing and muddy in colour, where you are doomed to carry for ever...

But, prithee, good Signor Coppola, is it not enough to be the heirs of Italy? Is it not enough to inhabit the most beautiful land in the world, the richest-dyed in historic tint...