TUSCANY
when I think of it I guess I think of silvery olive groves, I think of Dante and cyprus trees that necklace hills, Gentle purple mists, sweet air, seizing landscapes, stones that founded villages, villages, villages, golden dawns and blood-red sky in the gloam. Ember Olives ember olives and soft crinkles in eyes as they smile at you. Sweet salted air, fecundity and thick,
Michelangelo clouds, pizzas in piazzas and dark horses on terracotta earth that gallop gallop gallop through enchanted woods. fierce loyalty, sparkling river springs + endless dancing, dusty museums with treasures inside, eucalyptus air and the sound of the sea, colours colours everywhere especially in autumn when everything is passionate, true romances, summer sea
like aquamarine, the mystery of Montecristo. boys dressed as princes, men as kings, or clusters of pine tree spindles pressed into the ground. Searching for glimmering crystals. caverns and taverns and roasted chestnuts. Rocks for racing up. the sound of simple cooking somewhere next door, the scatter of jungle-green lizards as they trace the cracks in stone
walls. I think of looking down at the distant islands of the Archipelago, or feeling the light filter through the canopy like a kaleidoscope; wholesome, wholesome, wholesome, and wild.
I was thinking about Florence the other day and London and how I
thought I loved them because they’re so different but maybe I love them because they’re so similar. Not in terms of architecture or culture or anything like that, but they share that kind of feeling you get from a city, like its soul or energy or personality or something equally vague and pervasive. In both London and Florence there’s a sense of tolerance, restlessness, idealism, experimentation, inexorable ambition and the kind of dark, sordid beauty that inevitably accompanies all that. Maybe what you see in a city is what you see in yourself.
nemico che fugge, fa un ponte d’oro Bella cosa tosto è rapita Breve orazione penetra L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stele Noi non potemo avere perfetta vita senza amici Quel ch’è fatto, è fatto Non v’è rosa senza spina A chi vuole, non mancano modi.
A mali estremi, estremi rimedi. Al piu potente ceda il più prudente. nche il sole passa sopra il fango, e non s'imbratta.
Amor tutti eguaglia. Aiutati che Dio ti aiuta. Chi he sano e da pie del Sultano.
Chi vuol saldar pinga non la maneggia. È meglio star solo che mal accompagnato.
La gatta frettolosa ha fatto i gattini ciechi. Non si può aver il miele senza la pecchie.
Ogni regola ha la sua eccezione. La natura può più dell'arte.
Walter Pater (Monalisa): "The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
grazie mille!