"If you want to know something about these people and enjoy them somewhat, before buying the map of the city you should buy the sonnets of Gioacchino Belli, the true guide of Rome. It's easy reading, educational and fun. Dante should be read to understand Florence and the Florentines; Belli, to understand Rome and the Romans. The first one never makes you laugh, the second makes you laugh all the time. And then get to know the inns."

“From the moment painting ceased to be religious it started to decay, so that now it has reached a childishness that borders on idiocy. People who admire it are even greater idiots than those who paint. Art loses all reason for being if it's not animated by a great feeling.”

“Catholics in our age when confronted with dogma do not react or yield; they stay neutral, and receive it as one news item among others, as if it were a simple formality. It is as if they lacked the background needed in order to understand. It was the highest point of the Holy Year, the summit to be attained on that morning of All Saints. The prize, the great reward of those who had followed it in faith and fervor. The Pontiff's words flew over the square with a swish of wings, as if a multitude of doves had been released. One had only to close his eyes and let himself be carried away in an ecstasy of light. Instead, it became a perfect example of the contradiction inherent in our age, when man has learned to fly with his body only to forget the great flights of the soul. The people in Saint Peter's square looked like birds with severed wings.”

“When men have been deprived of faith and have been taught to hate work, so that they see it as an unbearable burden which provides illicit gain for crooked exploiters, then nothing is left but to go into the squares and shout the inner void which devours them, until they look like lost souls. Man reduced to a mere passage for food faces despair as soon as food becomes scarce or tasteless.”

“Science in its amazing conquests, the mind in its almost infinite ways, have only limited, barred, and obstructed their search for a reality which doesn't exist, since everything is real and everything is unreal. What do I care if I fly like a sparrow or a finch if my mind remains that of the sparrow and the finch.”

“The things that are being done in Jerusalem are not much different from those being done in Rome, New York, Berlin, Paris, everywhere. A hundred years more and all cities will resemble each other with enervating sameness, with gray, uniform flatness.”