I've finished reading Pictures from Italy, and a pleasant journey it has been.
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!
Pictures from Italy, "A Rapid Diorama"
Incidentally, the book also contains an essay from All the Year Round, "The Italian Prisoner," including a lengthy anecdote that I wish I could reprint in full. It's only the story of how Dickens got a bottle of wine from Italy back to England for a friend, but, being Dickens, he has you rolling on the floor by the time he's done telling it. Alas, it's far too long to reprint here -- you'll just have to buy the book!
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