Home > Topic > Piazza

Piazza QUOTES

Piazza QUOTES

1 " When I was in Piazza di Spagna, in Rome, I watched (along with others) how many locals came to drink water from the fountain there. The people beside me said to each other " Oh my goodness, how disgusting, people just drink water from anywhere," while the whole time, I was thinking " Oh my goodness, how wonderful, people can drink water from anywhere." We can be in the exact same place, looking at the exact same thing, but see that thing in a completely different way. You can go around the world, and go to all the beautiful places, but never be happy, because happiness is something that you bring inside of you, it is not where you are or what you are looking at, but it is how you are and how you look at. "

2 " So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not " unreal" (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness." —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_ "

3 " It was Don Paolo's birthday and all the people of the village were gathered in the piazza to celebrate him. The band played, the wine flowed, the children danced, and, as he stood for a moment alone under the pergola, a little girl approached the the beloved priest. " But Don Paolo, are you not happy?" she asked him. " Of course I am happy," he assured the little girl. " Why, then, aren't you crying? "

4 " Once back home I would adjust my lens to the resolution through which I perceived the people and provinces of the globe. My daily commute, the supermarket check out line, neighborhood walks, pedestrian tasks of any job would inspire me as much as the stir of white linen canopies in Venice’s Piazza San Marco; the velvety dunes of the eastern Sahara; Bali’s kaleidoscope of color; my Vietnamese sisters. "

― Gina Greenlee , Belly Up: Surviving and Thriving Beyond a Cruise Gone Bad

5 " Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian’s; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl’s ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay. "

― Gary Inbinder , The Flower to the Painter

6 " She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile. "

― Pamela Allegretto , Bridge of Sighs and Dreams

7 " A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand. "