100+ Magical Quotes about Italy For Every Possible Purpose

Even now I miss Italy dearly, I dream about it every night.

– Eila Hiltunen

One of the great joys of traveling through Italy is discovering firsthand that it is, indeed, a dream destination.

– from the book “Italy Luxury: Family Hotels & Resorts” by Debra Levinson

How beautiful is sunset, when the glow of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

I gasp for air if I don’t get to breathe Italian air once a year.

– Danny Meyer

You know, people come to Italy for all sorts of reasons, but when they stay, it’s for the same two things. Love and gelato.

– Jenna Evans Welch

The Creator made Italy by designs from Michelangelo.

– Mark Twain

For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery.

– D.H. Lawrence

Italy and London are the only places where I don’t feel to exist on sufferance.

– E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.

– Thomas Mann

Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.

– Alexander Herzen

My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.

– Frances Mayes

Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It’s alluring, but complicated. It’s the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or in the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.

– Beppe Severgnini

Italy is the last country where people savor the joy of living. It makes us believe it even when Italy herself has ceased to believe.

– Roger Peyrefitte

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

– Orson Welles

The Italian proverb says “See Naples and die” but I say, see Naples and live; for there seems a great deal worth living for.

– Arthur John Strutt

Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can get you a nice little villa in Tuscany, and that’s close enough for me.

– Lois Greiman, One Hot Mess

Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn’t have Rome. We wouldn’t have Florence. We wouldn’t have the marvel that is Venice.

– Matteo Renzi

Venice never quite seems real, but rather an ornate film set suspended on the water.

– Frida Giannini

Tuscany is so full of history and beauty – you meet wonders of art and architecture on almost every corner. But I love the region’s homier aspects: the special sweetness of the tomatoes, the soft mozzarella, the heady scents of basil and garlic everywhere.

– Trudie Styler

A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.

– Samuel Johnson

If I spoke Italian, I’d be in Italy in a minute. I love food, I love the way people live there. I mean, it really is my idea of paradise.

– Bonnie Bedelia

If you deconstruct Italy, you will, in the end, see a grapevine, a tomato and a small boy hammering a shard of marble.

– Pietros Maneos

And I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her. She is the school as well as the playground of the world.

– E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

If the landscape of human emotion were to exist in a country, it would be in Italy.

– Lisa Fantino

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

– Erica Jong

This was the Italy that fed her soul, where hope was restored and broken hearts were mended in the hands of great artists.

– Adriana Trigiani

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

– Bertrand Russell

A man has not fully lived until he experiences that gentle balmy clime of ancient empires, the land of lemon trees and the genius of Michelangelo.

– E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

All of my youth growing up in my Italian family was focused around the table. That’s where I learned about love.

– Leo Buscaglia

Italy was where the soul went to find calm and love, and I wanted to hold the best of it in the palm of my hand.

– Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

No matter where I’ve been overseas, the greatest joy was moving into Italy. Italy has changed me, for the better.

– Efrat Cybulkiewicz

And let us not remember Italy the less regardfully, because, in every fragment of her fallen temples, and every stone of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the lesson that the wheel of time is rolling for an end, and that the world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing, and more hopeful, as it rolls!

– Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy

A fool is one who admires other cities without visiting Rome.

– Francesco Petrarca

If we could be reborn wherever we chose, how crowded Rome would be, populated by souls who had spent their previous lives longing to inhabit a villa on the Janiculum Hill.

– Francine Prose

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.

– Giotto di Bondone

Rome! By all means, Rome. I will cherish my visit here in memory as long as I live.

– Audrey Hepburn

Rome will exist as long as the Colosseum does; when the Colosseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.

– Venerable Bede

Rome is not like any other city. It’s a majestic museum, a living room to tiptoe through.

– Alberto Sordi

Methinks I will not die quite happy without having seen something of that Rome.

– Sir Walter Scott

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

– Anatole Broyard

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

– Augustus

Rome knew love, better than I ever could, so I let the city take her hand, and followed close behind, picking up the pieces of her melting heart.

– Atticus

Rome lifts you up but won’t let you settle down – it turns you into a bird without a nest.

– Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

It was Rome. The whole city a museum.

– Darnell Lamont Walker

You fall in love with Rome very slowly, little by little, but if it happens, it will be for a lifetime…

– Nikolaj Gogol

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

– Henry James, The Portrait of A Lady

 Indeed, it was an Italian paradise…a veritable heaven.

– Giacomino Nicolazzo

​​The name of Italy had magic in its very syllables.

– Mary Shelley

In America, one must be something, but in Italy one can simply be.

– Pietros Maneos

Occasionally she dreams of Italy. She dreams of cheese shops, persnickety Fiats, and very fine leather goods.

– Kate Spade

Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.

– Anna Akhmatova

Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building after seeing Italy.

– Fanny Burney

Italy offers one the most priceless of one’s possessions – one’s own soul.

– Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

For sure, in Italy, the sun always shines.

– Aleksandar Mitrovic

In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence, you learn poise.

– Virgil Thomson

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

– Truman Capote

Venice is eternity itself.

– Joseph Brodsky 

Italy is my destiny; it calls to me to return home.

– Melissa Muldoon, Dreaming Sophia

All my ego wants is to be sitting by a lake in Italy. It doesn’t want to be backstage, warming up.

– Chet Faker

Italy is a geographical expression.

– Klemens von Metternich

Italian culture is so deeply soaked in an appreciation of the good things in life.

– Mariska Hargitay

Penne for your thoughts?

– Unknown

I fell madly in love with Italy, its people and its chaos.

– Nancy Yuktonis Solak

If bliss could be a color, today would be Amalfi Blue.

– Lisa Fantino

I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

I spent a college semester in a small town in Italy – and that is where I truly tasted food for the first time.

– Alton Brown

So… Italian gelato. Take the deliciousness of a regular ice-cream cone, times it by a million, then sprinkle it with crushed-up unicorn horns.

– Jenna Evans Welch, Love and Gelato

Everything you see I owe to pasta.

– Sophia Loren

Italy will always have the best food.

– Diane von Furstenberg

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

– Federico Fellini

Life is too short. If we’re in Italy, have pizza and pasta. But not every day.

– Harley Pasternak

In Italy, food is an expression of love. It is how you show those around you that you care for them. Having a love for food means you also have a love for those you are preparing it for and for yourself.

– Joe Bastianich

In Italy, they add work and life on to food and wine.

– Robin Leach

If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?

– Martin Scorsese

Whether a gastronomic tour of Italy, an elegant meal at the home of an Italian acquaintance, or “cooking Italian” back in one’s own kitchen, the prospect is mouth-watering.

– Claudia Piras, Culinaria Italy

You try to come up with new ideas, but in the end, people just want to eat Italian food.

– Stephen Starr

I love the simplicity, the ingredients, the culture, the history, and the seasonality of Italian cuisine. In Italy, people do not travel. They cook the way grandma did, using fresh ingredients and what is available in season.

– Anne Burrell

I’m definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working – if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato veins in Sardinia or Northern Italy.

– Anthony Bourdain

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.

– Mario Batali

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

– Mario Batali

I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It’s an older country, and they’ve learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.

– George Clooney

Quotes about Italians

I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don’t burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch.

– Barbara Kingsolver 

But when Italians say ‘Mangia! Mangia!’ they’re not just talking about food. They’re trying to get you to stay with them, to sit by them at the table for as long as possible.

– Sergio Esposito

When in Italy you should meet Italians.

– Isa Miranda

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

– E. M. Forster