36 Italy Travel Quotes

Italy is a land that enchants travelers with its timeless beauty, rich history, and vibrant culture. Whether you're cruising the canals of Venice, marveling at the art in Florence, savoring the flavors of Rome, or enjoying the scenic landscapes of the Amalfi Coast, Italy has a unique way of capturing hearts and igniting wanderlust. In this post, we’ve gathered a curated collection of the top 36 Italy travel quotes that encapsulate the essence of this captivating country. Let these words of wisdom and inspiration fuel your dreams of la dolce vita and spark your next Italian adventure.

1. “Noi leggeveamo un giorno per dilettoDi Lancialotto, come amor lo strinse;Soli eravamo e senza alcun sospettoPer più fiate gli occhi ci sospinseQuella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.Quando leggemmo il disiato risoEsser baciato da cotanto amante,Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse:Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante."""We were reading one day, to pass the time,of Lancelot, how love had seized him.We were alone, and without any suspicionAnd time and time again our eyes would meetover that literature, and our faces paled,and yet one point alone won us.When we had read how the desired smilewas kissed by so true a lover,This one, who never shall be parted from me,kissed my mouth, all a-tremble.Gallehault was the book and he who wrote itThat day we read no further.” - Dante Alighieri

2. “First of all, let's get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. 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

3. “In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.” - Carl Zimmer

4. “If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism."(Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)” - Winston Churchill

5. “Lord, my hands were made for blessing, but not my feet!” - Giovanni Guareschi

6. “Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. 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. (p. 247)” - Barbara Kingsolver

7. “Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have...undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It's because he doesn't care! He's in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery. I am so tired of saying no, waking up in the morning and recalling every single thing I ate the day before, counting every calorie I consumed so I know just how much self loathing to take into the shower. I'm going for it. I have no interest in being obese, I'm just through with the guilt. So this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to finish this pizza, and then we are going to go watch the soccer game, and tomorrow we are going to go on a little date and buy ourselves some bigger jeans.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

8. “Goddammit! How does the world keep spinning with women on the planet?"Ian St. John in THE POMPEII SCROLL” - Jacqueline LaTourrette

9. “Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.” - Marion Zimmer Bradley

10. “Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.” - R.C. Robertson-Glasgow

11. “Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

12. “When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.” - Robert Stacy McCain

13. “The delay in the application of the policy to books has several explanations. For one thing, Blackshirts were not, nor have they yet become, bookworms; and the intellectual bread of Mussolini himself is made, usually, of clippings. They did not care too much about things which they could not hate since they usually did not know them....” - Giuseppe Borgese

14. “Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.” Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.” - E.M. Forster

15. “Rome seems a comfort to those with the ambitious soul of an Artist or a Conqueror.” - Pietros Maneos

16. “Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.” - Marsilio Ficino

17. “Do you know how fast you are walking? ... To get a close estimate, count the number of steps you take in a minute and divide by 30... :)” - Albina Fabiani

18. “When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!” - Barbara Conelli

19. “Tutt'intorno a noi scorreva la città di Roma, splendida nella sua indifferenza, eternamente sicura di sé, felice di prendersi i nostri soldi e posare per una foto, ma senza avere alla fin fine bisogno di niente e di nessuno.” - Gary Shteyngart

20. “Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence.” - Julianne Davidow

21. “I wish Italy would stop being a crybaby. I wish he would kick his bad habit of wanting to eat pasta everywhere. I wish he would stop getting a stomachache every time he ate geleto. I wish he would learn to throw a grenade properly. I wish his older brother would stop trying to punch me. I wish-"*babble babble babble*"Germany . . . That's impossible . . .” - Hidekaz Himaruya

22. “Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.” - E.M. Forster

23. “Eccolo!” he exclaimed.At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.“Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.”She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her…” - E.M. Forster

24. “At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.” - Frances Mayes

25. “Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor’s preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum rolls the two flag-bearers hurled their flags high into the air and caught them, the crowd roaring in approval. The winner of the extremely dangerous horse race is presented with a palio, a standard bearing the effigy of the Virgin. In the last few years the jockeys have had to be professional by law, as when they were amateurs, corruption and bribery were rife. The teams wear a curious fancy dress encompassing styles from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. They are followed by gangs of young men, supporters, who create an atmosphere or intense rivalry and barely suppressed violence as they run through the narrow streets in the heat of the day. It was perfect. I took many more photographs. At the farmhouse that evening, after far too much Chianti, I and my friends played a bizarre game. In the dark, some of us moved lighted candles from one room to another, whilst others watched the effect of the light on faces and on the rooms from outside. It was like a strange living film of the paintings we had seen. Maybe Derek Jarman was spying on us.” - Roger Allam

26. “I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

27. “If the landscape of human emotion were to exist in country, it would be in Italy." ~Lisa Fantino/Amalfi Blue” - Lisa Fantino

28. “They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.” - E.M. Forster

29. “Gli Italiani devono capire una buona volta il rischio enorme di una cultura credulona ed ‘ascientifica’. Questo è un Paese, infatti, dove si gettano soldi alle ortiche per acquistare prodotti ‘omeopatici’, oppure per creme e tisane che nella migliore delle ipotesi non hanno alcun effetto. E’ un Paese dove ormai non si riesce più a far nulla di costruttivo perchè c’è sempre la paura che si vada a ’sconvolgere’ delicatissimi equilibri ‘immaginari’, paure alimentate ad arte da ‘politici’ che prosperano su falsità di ogni tipo. E’ un Paese dove Otelma, Vanna Marchi, Bossi e berlusconi hanno accumulato fortune economiche e politiche, e dove un Grillo qualunque (con tutto il rispetto per quest’ultimo in confronto ai summenzionati) può apparire un Gigante.Io penso che l’ignoranza collettiva, associata alla supponenza ed al fatalismo, rappresentino la più grave catastrofe per l’Umanità.” - Pino

30. “I wanted to hold onto this point in time before our eyes found each other and before I knew whether our hearts could do the same." Amalfi Blue” - Lisa Fantino

31. “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

32. “The name of Italy has magic in its very syllables.” - Mary Shelley

33. “erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.” - Jess Walter

34. “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

35. “Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.” - Henry James The Portrait of A Lady

36. “The transgression of Adam and Eve was not in learning the difference between good and evil but in treating the knowledge they received as something that was, literally, internal to them-a food that could be seized, devoured, and controlled by the individual.” - Michael Rips