The sky would have told
us we were in Italy if we had come on a magic carpet without a compass
or a time-table. Poppa says we are not, under any circumstances, to
mention it more than once, but that we might as well explode the fallacy
that there is anything like it in America. There isn't. Our cerulean is
very beautifully blue, but in Italy one discovers by contrast that it
is an intellectual blue, filled with light, high, provocative. The sky
that bends over Tuscany is the very soul of blue, deep, soft, intense,
impenetrable--the sky that one sees in those little casual bits of
landscape behind the shoulders of pre-Raphaelite Saints and Madonnas;
and here and there a lake, giving it back with delight, and now and then
the long slope of a hill, with an old yellow-walled town creeping up,
castle crowned, and raggedly trimmed with olives; and so many ruins that
the Senator, summoned by momma to look at the last in view, regarded it
with disparagement, which he did not attempt to conceal. He wondered, he
said, that the Italian Government wasn't ashamed of having such a lot of
them.
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