"You see things that I see every day, but with different eyes from me."     Barbara Catalini

“There is a large part of reality which the realistic Italians never really grasp; there are many things they do not see for being too clear sighted.”
     Luigi Barzini, The Italians

“Rome revisited, after the Orient and Greece, was clothed with a strangeness which a Roman born and bred wholly in the City would not find there. I accustomed myself once more to its damp and soot-grimed winters; to the African heat of its summers, tempered by the refreshing cascades of Tibur and by the Alban lakes.”