"Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel as if I have made a mistake. All too often I have changed my plans and left - from a ski resort in the French Alps, a mountain town in Switzerland, a country house in Provence - to get to Italy as soon as possible. Once across the border I can breathe again. Why bother to go anywhere, I think in those first ecstatic moments of reentry, but Italy?
What do we find in Italy that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human that other countries lost long ago. Not only is Italy one of the few places left where fantasy runs unfettered as Luigi Barzini said in "The Italians", 'even instruments of precision like speedometers and clocks are made to lie in Italy for your happiness'; it is also one of the few places that tolerate human nature with all its faults. Italy is the past, but it is also the future. It is pagan, but it is also Christian and Jewish. It is grand and tawdry, imperishable and decayed. Italy has seen marauding armies, Fascists and Communists, fashions and fripperies come and go. And it is still, for all its layers of musty history, a place that enhances existence, burnishes the moment...."
---Erica Jong, from "My Italy"
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