Quotes About Florence

I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know.

La notte e vicina per me. Those were the words that an elderly Italian woman, an old crone who swept the stairs, had uttered to Fran when she was working as an au pair girl in Florence, a hundred years ago.

Flush likes civilised life, and the society of little dogs with turned-up tails, such as Florence abounds with. Unhappily it abounds also with fleas, which afflict poor Flush to the verge sometimes of despair. Fancy Robert and me down on our knees combing him, with a basin of water on one side! He suffers to such a degree from fleas that I cannot bear to witness it. He tears off his pretty curls through the irritation. Do you know of a remedy?

Since then the tree of liberty has come down with a crash and we have had another festa as noisy on that occasion. Revolution and counter-revolution, Guerazzi and Leopold, sacking of Florence and entrance of the Austrian army — we live through everything, you see, and baby grows fat indiscriminately.

This cathedral! After all, the elaborate grace of the Pisan cathedral is one thing, and the massive grandeur of this of Florence is another and better thing; it struck me with a sense of the sublime in architecture. At Pisa we say, 'How beautiful!' here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe. The mountainous marble masses overcome as we look up — we feel the weight of them on the soul.

1852-55 The middle of November found the travellers back again in Florence, and it was nearly three years before they again quitted Italy. No doubt, after the excitement of the coup d'état in Paris, and the subsequent manÅ"uvres of Louis Napoleon, which culminated in this very month in his exchanging the title of President for that of Emperor, Florence must have seemed very quiet, if not dull.

Oh yes! I confess to loving Florence and to having associated with it the idea of home. My child was born here, and here I have been very happy and well. Yet we shall not live in Florence — we are steady to our Paris plan. We must visit Rome next winter, and in the spring we shall go to Paris viâ London;

In Florence he never goes anywhere, you know; even here this winter he has had too much gloom about him by far. But he looks entirely well — as does Penini. I am weak and languid. I struggle hard to live on. I wish to live just as long as and no longer than to grow in the soul.

love Italy — I love my Florence. I love that 'hole of a place,' as Father Prout called it lately — with all its dust, its cobwebs, its spiders even, I love it, and with somewhat of the kind of blind, stupid, respectable, obstinate love which people feel when they talk of 'beloved native lands.' I feel this for Italy, by mistake for England. Florence is my chimney-corner, where I can sulk and be happy.

Galileo died in 1642. He was buried in Florence in the Church of Santa Croce, directly opposite the tomb of Michelangelo. This is only right, since together they had remade the Renaissance world in a distinctly Platonist frame.

If Aristotle had been right and it was man's destiny to be free, if our nature as human beings makes us fit to govern our lives as we see fit, then why is it that everywhere we look human beings are unfree and submit to various forms of tyranny and slavery, including now in Florence? Why did freedom fail, not only in Florence but throughout history—even ancient Greece and Rome?

The Prince. Some would insist that the book was inspired by the devil.25 But Machiavelli was only a close student of Aristotle's version of civic liberty, which led him in the wake of Savonarola's fall to ask some uncomfortable questions. What if God really didn't care whether Florence survived as a republic or not? What if God didn't really care whether men lived as free men or slaves? And what if human nature suits us as much for servitude as it does for liberty?

The highest form of life, Aristotle said, was that of the householder, who "as a citizen shared in the civic life of ruling and being ruled in turn."5 That certainly sounded a lot like life in 1402 Florence as well as fifth-century BCE Athens.

Renaissance Florence did not forget about the importance of Christianity and sacred values. It was said that Manetti knew three works by heart: the Ethics of Aristotle, Saint Paul's letters, and Augustine's City of God.17 Still, the Florentines did insist that education needed to reflect the new secular emphasis on human freedom and the pursuit of excellence for its own sake.

By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato's theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy's two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato's doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.

You go to Florence and all the paintings you've seen in books are there. To see them in real life, it just blows your mind.

My husband is from Florence. And he has a 15th-century barn that is completely rustic and very 'Green Acres'-like.

Just believe me when I tell you that the city is beautiful – and not in the oppressive way of, say, Florence, where you're almost afraid to leave your room because you might break something.

Eitington, whom I met in Florence, is now here and will probably visit me soon to give me detailed impressions of Amsterdam. He seems to have taken up with some woman again. Such practice is a deterrent from theory. When I have totally overcome my libido (in the common sense), I shall undertake to write a 'Love-life of Mankind'.

former estate that is now a public park sporting Florence's biggest

They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in.

Michelangelo proposed to the pope that he make a large copy of the Pantheon dome on top of the new St. Peter's. The horrified pontiff replied that Hadrian's dome was pagan—the Vatican cathedral had to have a Christian-looking dome, like the one built in Florence a century before by Brunelleschi.

The ambitious pope had already discussed the Sistine ceiling with Michelangelo in 1506, probably while they were together in Bologna. No doubt Julius, an art lover, had heard of the huge success of the twin cartoons for the city hall frescoes in Florence. It is very likely that his summons to Michelangelo was also a way for the jealous Roman pontiff to sabotage the Florentine fresco project. We do know that Michelangelo never went back to that job.

Michelangelo then summarily fired his Roman staff of assistants. He next sent for five longtime friends, all artists with experience in fresco work, to come in from Florence for the duration of the project. Some would later on be replaced, but Buonarroti hired only Florentine helpers with tightly closed lips, so that none of the Roman spies could find out what he was really putting up on the Sistine ceiling.