'This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character.'
from Il Gattopardo - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
