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I feel like all the American artists are aesthetically not very interesting and mired in a complaining relationship to its own culture, whereas the Italian work, from a different era, is so comfortable with its relationship to nature and to culture.
Sep 10, 2025
Week before that, I was out in Italy Italian heart-throbs could not get rid of me
It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit. I used to spend that time studying Italian and French. Then after I had two kids, my brain turned to mush and I took up knitting.
I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he's an American child.
Dante Alighieri has the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. So it's talking about us, it's concerning us. Everything in it conveys sentiment, emotions. He is really the greatest poet ever. So I am really very proud to present the shining pearl of Italian culture around the world.
The earliest movies that I loved were French movies and Italian movies. I grew up watching those kind of movies and often find the truest looks at human nature - you can find them in another countrys movies.
An English army led by an Irish general: that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general.
I wanted to go to Rome. I got an offer to do an Italian film and I went.
If I start feeling down I'll gorge myself on pasta. That usually does the trick. It's the Italian blood in me.
I grew up watching a lot of Italian and French movies, so I want to have that '70s look, in my dream movie. I want that thing that's not so much happening now, that's existentialist.
A particular type of film emerged from World War Two, with the Italian neorealist school. It was perfectly right for its time, which was as exceptional as the reality around us. Our major interest focused on that and on how we could relate to it. Later, when the situation normalized and post-war life returned to what it had been in peacetime, it became important to see the intimate, interior consequences of all that had happened.
In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce.
The first wine I drank, a Chateau Haut-Brion, I was 22, it was my first glass of wine, and I discovered voluptuousness. From there, I started tasting French wines, then Spanish wines, then Italian wines.
Fascism was part of the absolute evil. (...) We have to denounce the ashaming pages in the history of our past. (...) There included all the pages related to the discrimination and the persecution of jews and, more in general, of minoritires. And therefore that one [The Italian Social Republic of Salò] is also included.
The best part was the food. There are some great Italian restaurants we go to whenever we are in Toronto, so the eating was a definite highlight.
Do you remember when we played in Spain in the Anglo-Italian Cup?
I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later.
An Italian piazza was my vision - a place where people would come and meet, see an exhibition, browse through books, have a drink, eat, rest, shop. Even today, the best compliment is when someone tells me that they were having a difficult day, and when they came here, they felt better.
I am one who is very meridione - Southern Italian. I am proud of this. I design everything with my team, which is fantastic and small. I design by look. For example, people always comment to me, "When you do men's shirts, you always keep them closed on the catwalk." That's my thing.
The toughest nights when I was a young, unknown comedian were opening for these real old-time Italian singers. I'm like Grace Jones to them. "This guy is nuts-talking about socks. Where's the wife jokes, where's the fat jokes?"
I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.
I never worry about what they think about me. Because I feel so far away from what my Italian colleagues have done that I almost automatically become an isolated director.
My goal is to make Italian food clean and accessible and beautiful and tasty, with simple ingredients that people can find at a local grocery store, because people don't want to go to a gourmet shop in search of items that will sit in their pantry for years after they use just a teaspoon or pinch of them.
I'm a big pasta fan. I'm a big Italian food fan. Anything Italian - I love cheese, mozzarella. Mozzarella is my favorite, so I have to say anything Italian, I'll take it.
Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.
I made lemon spaghetti in an early season of 'Everyday Italian,' and to this day people still come up to me and say they love it. It's very, very simple. Basically, you cook the pasta and mix together Parmesan cheese, olive oil, lemon juice and zest and pour it over the pasta.
I am not one to turn down macaroni and cheese, even late at night. I love Italian food. I love pasta... A refrigerator full of water and Gatorade? Honey, that's just not gonna happen.
St. Louis has a lot of weird food customs that you don't see other places - and a lot of great ethnic neighborhoods. There's a German neighborhood. A great old school Italian neighborhood, with toasted ravioli, which seems to be a St. Louis tradition. And they love provolone cheese in St. Louis.
Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.
Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.
The Government has been compelled to levy taxes which unavoidably hit large sections of the population. The Italian people are disciplined, silent and calm, they work and know that there is a Government which governs, and know, above all, that if this Government hits cruelly certain sections of the Italian people, it does not so out of caprice, but from the supreme necessity of national order.
The school even had a Latin motto: Pergo et Perago, which sounded like the story of two Italian cannibals but which actually meant “I try and I achieve.
Shevchenko is the best attacker in Europe. He has a great deal of consistency and he just keeps scoring - which in Italian football is very difficult. He is a complete player, someone who can do everything on a football field.
I was a mod when I was a kid. I'd be in Italian pencil-leg trousers with those bowling shoes you wear outside and a Fred Perry polo shirt with a V-neck sweater. It was like an Essex uniform - a very specific look.
I went to schools that were small enough that basically everyone was in a play. I played a bouncing ball in a production of Alice in Wonderland and a fat man in an Italian commedia dell'arte play. I was given some small chances.
I have much to learn from my daughter Sofia. Her minimalism exposes my limitations: I'm too instinctive and operatic, I put too much heart into my work, I get lost sometimes in bizarre things - it's my Italian heritage.
I listen to everything from, you know, Buddha Bar groove music to international music, Italian music, like Eros. I like very sexy, funky music like Maxwell, Angie Stone, R&B...In my CD player, I've probably got Maxwell, Beyonce, Enrique Iglesias, and kid music...maybe some AC/DC. I mean a little bit of everything. It depends on what I'm doing.
I eat like a kid. I like Chief Boyardee. Their Ravioli, but they have some stuff I've never seen in the real Italian food world. You ever been in a nice Italian restaurant? Hi how are you? Ummm id like to start with a nice bottle of Chanti and a couple of Caesar Salads and umm I'm going to have the Beef a'ronni. And some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the lady.
I love eating shabu-shabu in Japan - a kind of beef hotpot. But if you're talking about authentic, traditional food, then Italian cooking is one of the best in the world.
I was raised in an Italian catholic family in Baltimore, Maryland. Our faith is very important to us, our patriotism, love of faith, love of family, love of country. I took pride in our Italian American heritage and to be the first woman speaker of the House and the first Italian American speaker of the House, it's quite thrilling for me.
French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
[Dario Argento] speaks very broken English - he's Italian, so I'm going to do a very bad Italian impersonation - but he asked me my name, and I told him, and he goes, "Walk across the room." He looked at me, and he said, "Do you want to be in my movie [Two Evil Eyes]?" I was, like, "Yeah! Yeah, I do!"He goes, "Okay! You play Betty!" And I was, like, "Oh, I'm playing an extra named Betty! Great!" So we walked out, thinking that I was playing an extra named Betty, no lines, just background.
On the field I defend our colours, love our flag and sing our anthem. I could not be more Italian than I am now.
Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,--not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us--the Irish!
A really interesting and happy time was when I first went to Florence as a student and studied Italian. I was living in a pensione on an allowance of £40 a month, which was princely. I did a lot of work and enjoyed myself immensely.
Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their subjects, others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions...Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia [an Italian city] by factions and Pisa by fortress, and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.
Fortunately the Italian people has not yet accustomed itself to eat many times a day, and possessing a modest level of living, it feels deficiency and suffering less.
So, if I ever played Napoleon it would be with an Italian accent. He was an outsider, which also interests me.
The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.
Recently I was reading somewhere or other an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.