Italy Quote by Franco di Mare

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

— Stacy Schiff

“The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid…

— Maya Angelou

“Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's…

— Olivia Sudjic

“... in St. Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe. (Cities and be intentional or unintentional.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated.”

— Meg Wolitzer

“A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.”

— Epictetus

“All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in…

— Nathan Reese Maher

“I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made…

— Sheridan Hay

“What he saw seemed to be the very idea of a city, barnacled and thick with itself.”

— David Edison

“I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may…

— Jesse Ball

“And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe,…

— Elena Ferrante

“That's what's so miraculous about the city: each person's bearing and behavior vanish among these thousand sorts, observations are fleeting, judgements swift, and forgetting…

— Robert Walser