Quotes About Venetians

Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.

Vianello had the knack of getting people to talk. Especially if they were Venetians, the people he interviewed invariably warmed to this large, sweet-tempered man who gave every appearance of speaking Italian reluctantly, who was only too glad to lapse into their common dialect, a linguistic change that often carried its speakers along to unconscious revelation.

All the inhabitants of Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians," wrote the visitor Martin von Baumgarten in 1508, "obliged to pay to the state a third of all their increase or income…and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together.

i montanari, moralmente più puri, sono fisicamente più robusti e «triplicano» le consonanti, la gente di pianura (guai poi se sta al livello del mare come i veneziani) invece, oltre che moralmente depravata, è anche fisicamente degenerata e «scempia» le consonanti.

They were Englishmen and, to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of its own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of anybody else's) that they would not have been at all surprised to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city - until Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful.

Only then were the doors of the basilica opened, and the assembled company proceeded in state for prayers at the high altar before going on to Mass in the Sistine Chapel—all except the pope, who, as one of the Venetians explained in his report, "never attended these long services.