The compliments you are about to pay could only sadden me, because what you love in our dear peninsula is exactly the object of our hatreds. Indeed, you crisscross Italy only to meticulously sniff out the traces of our oppressive past, and you are happy, insanely happy, if you have the good fortune to carry home some miserable stone on which our ancestors have trodden.
"Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America" by Anthony L. Geist, Jose B. Monle-N, Taylor & Francis, (p. 57), 1999.
