Via del Corso

'There are verandas and balconies, of all shapes and sizes, to almost every house - not on one storey alone, but often to one room or another on every storey - put there in general with so little order or regularity, that if, year after year, and season after season, it had rained balconies, hailed balconies, snowed balconies, blown balconies, they could scarcely have come into existence in a more disorderly manner.'

from Pictures from Italy - Charles Dickens

Shadows

'Magnificently stern and sombre are the streets of beautiful Florence; and the strong old piles of building make such heaps of shadow, on the ground and in the river, that there is another and a different city of rich forms and fancies, always lying at our feet.'

- Charles Dickens

Impressions

'What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!'

- Charles Dickens

Voices in the Waves

'And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love - of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!'

- Charles Dickens