Italian Hours

Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits of past adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what the summer could be in the south or the south i...

Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a scramble over marble floors, but, by...

We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all that we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law not on the whole, I think, to be regretted, for...

The chapters of which this volume is composed have with few exceptions already been collected, and were then associated with others commemorative of other impressions of (no ver...

_March 9th._--The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of hours there yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, fresh from the East, had no overcoat and wa...

Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was a great deal of entertainment t...

This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of the piazza, itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it, picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plan...

Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where everything is so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite of himself into the concert....

The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and there are fewer pitfalls and dit...

I must confess, however, that “feudal” as it amused me to find the little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an exasperated rising. On the contrary, the...

These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I rejoice to say--and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it, where the ground about them was presse...

It wasn’t, however, that one mightn’t without disloyalty to that scheme of profit seek impressions further afield--though indeed I may best say of such a matter as the long pilg...

It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it was expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise of some rare silvery shell, washed up by the sea o...

Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace on one of the hills that encircle Flo...

Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent, but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes the place rather perhaps the last...

At Flüelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs in a way to turn nervous people’s thou...

If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher intensity, you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to Pisa--where, for that matter, you will seem to yours...

_January 2nd,_ 1873.--Two or three drives with A.--one to St. Paul’s without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the Aventine. I was freshly struck with the rare d...

And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one’s mood--as a traveller’s impressions do, generally, to a degree which those who give them to the world would do well...

One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one’s respects--without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and sitting down a while,...

This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, adds a difficulty to any control of one’s notes. The Grand Canal may be practically, as in impression, th...

The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such initiations content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two great candid spaces: the fan-shaped piazza, of wh...

I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my next adventures or impressions at Assisi, which could n’t well be anything more than mere romantic _flanerie_. One may eas...

If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has left behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy, which rears its blank wall, surmounte...

A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was no life but the visible tremor of the br...

Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to the great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, were not “subtly” imaginativ...

In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated and profaned though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if stale redolence of old Catholicism and old Italy. The...

The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the better and for the worse; for the better in that it has been shortened by a couple of hours; for the wors...

I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much the same uninvestigating fashion--taking in the “general impression,” I dare say, at every pore, but rather systematic...

Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily revolution--quite thereby on the circumference--was the great Company of Four in their sequestered corner; object...

The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate, through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant operatic show, a box at the best p...

It is a pleasure that doubles one’s horizon, and one can scarcely say whether it enlarges or limits one’s impression of the city proper. It certainly makes St. Peter’s seem a tr...

The “other” afternoons I here pass on to--and I may include in them, for that matter, various mornings scarce less charmingly sacred to memory--were occasions of another and a l...