Italian ​Hours 1 csillagozás

Henry James: Italian Hours

'The ​charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it' – Henry James. In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. James' enthusiastic appreciation of the unparalleled aesthetic allure of Venice, the vitality of Rome, and the noisy, sensuous appeal of Naples is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of nineteenth-century Europe.John Auchard's lively introduction and extensive notes illuminate the surprising differences between the historical, political, and artistic Italy of James' travels and the metaphoric Italy that became the setting… (tovább)

A következő kiadói sorozatban jelent meg: Penguin Classics Penguin

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Penguin, London, 1995
416 oldal · puhatáblás · ISBN: 9780140435078

Népszerű idézetek

blankaveronika I>!

I believe, of tourists primed for retrospective raptures. Ceartainly the Capitol seen from this side isn't commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo's architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place somehow so much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first ten minutes of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly to have sunk through a trap-door. It emerges however on the other side, in the Forum; and here meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you get gradually a sense of exquisite composition. Nowhere in Rome is more colour, more charm, more sport for the eye.

page 126

blankaveronika I>!

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, generally at the foot of the cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in the depths of some Alpine valley.

page 129

blankaveronika I>!

Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won't grudge the twenty minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away under the Arch of Constantine […] toward the piazzetta of the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents.

page 129

blankaveronika I>!

The first day of my stay in Rome under the old dispensation I spent wandering at random through the city, with accident for my valet-de-place. It served me to perfection and introduced me to the best things; among others to an immediate happy relation with Santa Maria Maggiore.

page 132

blankaveronika I>!

First impressions, memorable impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they often leave one the wiser, but they rarely return in the same form.

page 132

blankaveronika I>!

The wood was ringing with sound because it was twilight, spring and Italy.

page 158

blankaveronika I>!

[…] the all-venerable visage disoncerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It isn't simply that you are never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where you have dreamt of persuading the shy genius loci into confidential utterance; it isn't simply that St.Peter's, the Vatican, the Palatine, are forever ringing with the false note of the languages without style: it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become for the time a monostrous mixture of watering-place and curiosity-shop and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios and yawn though palaces and temples.

page 170

blankaveronika I>!

Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by the grand gesture[…]

page 171

blankaveronika I>!

The collective Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it abroad in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace.

page 171

blankaveronika I>!

The number of young men here who, like the coenobites of old, lead the purely contemplative life is enormous. They muster in especial force on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is thronged with them. They are well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never to do a herder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to the Hotel de Rome or vice versa.

page 182


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