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Pictures From Italy by Charles Dickens Book Review
The Italian countryside is full of ruins, temples, churches, relics, and wicked Roman rituals.
Venice is a dream scene.
Rome is a disgusting show of pageantry, relic worship, and tall hats on ugly men.
Dickens Necromancy.
Dickens describes execution he attended in Rome. Chop goes the chopping block. Head rolls into leather gherkin. Cascading pools of blood splattered on guillotine device.
Dickens climbs to the top of Vesuvius and peers into the gaping maw of the fiery crater.
He plays the lottery and describes a little boy with a sleeveless smock (to avoid any sleight-of-hand trickery) pick numbers from a cask.
Dickens describes St. Peter’s lit by gun powder or some kind of Greek fire technology.
Dickens describes universal church temple. The stairs must be climbed on one’s knees, at the top, seen through curtained opening in vault, holy Roman relics of great authenticity.
Exit through the gift shop on the way out.
Dickens describes Carnival in Rome. Just as pagan as the one you are thinking of. I was waiting for Dickens to say, “And for the gift of festive nosegays the chambermaid showed me her bodice.” But alas, he never said it.
Pictures From Italy by Charles Dickens Book Review
My annotations and highlights:
Chapter 1536: GOING THROUGH FRANCE
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Chapter progress: 69.94%
Highlight: I don’t believe we saw a hundred children between Paris and Chalons.
Chapter 1536: GOING THROUGH FRANCE
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Chapter progress: 69.95%
Highlight: The door is opened. Breathless expectation. The lady of the family gets out. Ah sweet lady! Beautiful lady! The sister of the lady of the family gets out. Great Heaven, Ma’amselle is charming! First little boy gets out. Ah, what a beautiful little boy! First little girl gets out. Oh, but this is an enchanting child! Second little girl gets out. The landlady, yielding to the finest impulse of our common nature, catches her up in her arms! Second little boy gets out. Oh, the sweet boy! Oh, the tender little family! The baby is handed out. Angelic baby! The baby has topped everything. All the rapture is expended on the baby! Then the two nurses tumble out; and the enthusiasm swelling into madness, the whole family are swept up-stairs as on a cloud; while the idlers press about the carriage, and look into it, and walk round it, and touch it. For it is something to touch a carriage that has held so many people. It is a legacy to leave one’s children.
Notes: Dickens and family arrive at French hotel in coach pulled by four horses.
Chapter 1536: GOING THROUGH FRANCE
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Chapter progress: 69.96%
Highlight: We are astir at six next morning. It is a delightful day, shaming yesterday’s mud upon the carriage, if anything could shame a carriage, in a land where carriages are never cleaned. Everybody is brisk; and as we finish breakfast, the horses come jingling into the yard from the Post-house. Everything taken out of the carriage is put back again. The brave Courier announces that all is ready, after walking into every room, and looking all round it, to be certain that nothing is left behind. Everybody gets in. Everybody connected with the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is again enchanted. The brave Courier runs into the house for a parcel containing cold fowl, sliced ham, bread, and biscuits, for lunch; hands it into the coach; and runs back again.
Notes: Dickens and family on road trip.
Chapter 1537: LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
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Chapter progress: 69.97%
Highlight: All up the hills that hem the city in, these houses swarm; and the mites inside were lolling out of the windows, and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge piles and bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or rather not dying till their time should come, in an exhausted receiver.
Notes: Lyons French
Chapter 1537: LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
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Chapter progress: 69.97%
Highlight: and it bears such fruit as I would go some miles out of my way to avoid encountering again.
Notes: Concentration camp for essential workers.
Chapter 1537: LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
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Chapter progress: 69.97%
Highlight: Tom Noddy,
Notes: Ask Circe
Chapter 1537: LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
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Chapter progress: 70.01%
Highlight: Should enable them to show themselves, in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a great, solemn, legal establishment, in the height of its power!
Notes: Alphabet Inc.gov pharmaceutical embargo.
Chapter 1537: LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
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Chapter progress: 70.01%
Highlight: I felt exalted with the proud delight of living in these degenerate times, to see it.
Notes: Face mask BDSM ritual to science.
Chapter 1538: AVIGNON TO GENOA
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Chapter progress: 70.02%
Highlight: Within a few minutes afterwards, five hundred persons were reduced to ashes: the whole of that wing of the building having been blown into the air with a terrible explosion!
Notes: red wedding feast.
Chapter 1538: AVIGNON TO GENOA
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Chapter progress: 70.03%
Highlight: Next day we went down to the harbour, where the sailors of all nations were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds: fruits, wines, oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of merchandise.
Notes: 1846 french
Chapter 1539: GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
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Chapter progress: 70.09%
Highlight: A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of an extravagant reality!
Notes: Genoa. Dickens rents a villa for a year.
Chapter 1539: GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
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Chapter progress: 70.1%
Highlight: On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves, as their ancestors were of putting houses, in every available inch of space in and about the town. In all the lanes and alleys, and up every little ascent, and on every dwarf wall, and on every flight of steps, they cluster like bees.
Chapter 1539: GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
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Chapter progress: 70.11%
Highlight: the effect, just then, was very superb indeed. For the whole building was dressed in red; and the sinking sun, streaming in, through a great red curtain in the chief doorway, made all the gorgeousness its own. When the sun went down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small dangling silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective. But, sitting in any of the churches towards evening, is like a mild dose of opium.
Notes: The church is a drug.
Chapter 1539: GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
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Chapter progress: 70.13%
Highlight: The effect of this costume is very ghastly: especially in the case of a certain Blue Confratérnita belonging to Genoa, who, to say the least of them, are very ugly customers, and who look — suddenly encountered in their pious ministration in the streets — as if they were Ghoules or Demons, bearing off the body for themselves.
Notes: Fraternal bros in sheets take away the dead.
Chapter 1539: GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
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Chapter progress: 70.14%
Highlight: Italians have little cause to sympathise with Napoleon,
Chapter 1539: GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
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Chapter progress: 70.15%
Highlight: There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds, whither we removed as soon as our three months’ tenancy of the Pink Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.
Chapter 1539: GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
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Chapter progress: 70.17%
Highlight: There never was anything so perfect of its kind as the contemplative way in which he allowed his placid gaze to rest on us, his late companions, as if he had never seen us in his life and didn’t see us then.
Notes: Friar.
Chapter 1541: THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA
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Chapter progress: 70.23%
Highlight: where there are a host of interesting pictures, especially by Guido, Domenichino, and Ludovico Caracci:
Chapter 1541: THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA
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Chapter progress: 70.24%
Highlight: I wonder, above all, why it is the great feature of domestic architecture in Italian inns, that all the fire goes up the chimney, except the smoke!
Chapter 1543: BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND
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Chapter progress: 70.31%
Highlight: it is better for Juliet to lie out of the track of tourists, and to have no visitors but such as come to graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine.
Notes: Dickens visits Capulets house in Verona vis Romeo y Juliet.
Chapter 1543: BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND
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Chapter progress: 70.33%
Highlight: Piazza del Diavolo, built by the Devil (for no particular purpose) in a single night;
Chapter 1543: BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND
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Chapter progress: 70.36%
Highlight: It was late in November; and the snow lying four or five feet thick in the beaten road on the summit (in other parts the new drift was already deep), the air was piercing cold. But, the serenity of the night, and the grandeur of the road, with its impenetrable shadows, and deep glooms, and its sudden turns into the shining of the moon and its incessant roar of falling water, rendered the journey more and more sublime at every step.
Notes: Into the alps on horse drawn carriage.
Chapter 1543: BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND
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Chapter progress: 70.36%
Highlight: A sledge being then made ready, and four horses harnessed to it, we went, ploughing, through the snow.
Chapter 1543: BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND
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Chapter progress: 70.37%
Highlight: Or how Strasbourg itself, in its magnificent old Gothic Cathedral, and its ancient houses with their peaked roofs and gables, made a little gallery of quaint and interesting views; or how a crowd was gathered inside the cathedral at noon, to see the famous mechanical clock in motion, striking twelve.
Chapter 1544: TO ROME BY PISA AND SIENA
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Chapter progress: 70.38%
Highlight: There is nothing in Italy, more beautiful to me, than the coast-road between Genoa and Spezzia.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.45%
Highlight: We entered the Eternal City, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, on the thirtieth of January, by the Porta del Popolo, and came immediately — it was a dark, muddy day, and there had been heavy rain — on the skirts of the Carnival.
Notes: Gd romans having carnival.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.45%
Highlight: It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable.
Notes: Roman coliseum.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.45%
Highlight: It might be a Pantheon, or a Senate House, or a great architectural trophy, having no other object than an architectural triumph.
Notes: St. Peter’s is a repurposed structure.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.5%
Highlight: is supposed by some to be a ceremony of burlesque mourning for the death of the Carnival: candles being indispensable to Catholic grief.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.5%
Highlight: Beautiful women, standing up in coaches, pointing in derision at extinguished lights, and clapping their hands, as they pass on, crying, ‘Senza Moccolo! Senza Moccolo!
Notes: Some kind of weird roman candle snuffing ritual.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.52%
Highlight: Among the innumerable churches, there is one I must select for separate mention. It is the church of the Ara Coeli,
Notes: Great story about bejeweled baby jesus relic.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.53%
Highlight: For the Souls in Purgatory;
Notes: Collection sign.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.53%
Highlight: These represent the martyrdoms of saints and early Christians; and such a panorama of horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper.
Notes: Parasites.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.54%
Highlight: Many churches have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which, in the ancient time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples, and what not: but I do not speak of them.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.55%
Highlight: The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half o’clock, Roman time: or a quarter before nine in the forenoon.
Notes: Roman time.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.55%
Highlight: So, I determined to go, and see him executed.
Notes: Dickens is a necromancer.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.57%
Highlight: There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was taken off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.
Notes: Execution by Dickens.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.57%
Highlight: He who will contemplate Raphael’s masterpiece, the Transfiguration, and will go away into another chamber of that same Vatican, and contemplate another design of Raphael, representing (in incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping of a great fire by Leo the Fourth
Notes: Hehe
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.57%
Highlight: we should sometimes feign an admiration, though we have it not.
Notes: Vatican
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.58%
Highlight: There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the Vatican;
Notes: Make sense. Not.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.58%
Highlight: Insomuch that I do honestly believe, there can be no place in the world, where such intolerable abortions, begotten of the sculptor’s chisel, are to be found in such profusion, as in Rome.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.6%
Highlight: It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of the old mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend and observance: have been incorporated into the worship of Christian altars here; and how, in numberless respects, the false faith and the true are fused into a monstrous union.
Notes: Rome
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.61%
Highlight: Sir, will you oblige me! Do you see a Mustard-Pot?
Notes: Last supper pantomime. Rome.
Chapter 1545: ROME
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Chapter progress: 70.62%
Highlight: This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps, said to have belonged to Pontius Pilate’s house and to be the identical stair on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down from the judgment-seat.
Notes: Scala Santa holy stairs.
Chapter 1546: A RAPID DIORAMA
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Chapter progress: 70.65%
Highlight: What glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is now heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gambol unmolested in the sun!
Chapter 1546: A RAPID DIORAMA
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Chapter progress: 70.66%
Highlight: hideously masked,
Notes: All covid mask freaks need to step down.
Chapter 1546: A RAPID DIORAMA
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Chapter progress: 70.7%
Highlight: But, we contrive to climb up to the brim, and look down, for a moment, into the Hell of boiling fire below. Then, we all three come rolling down; blackened, and singed, and scorched, and hot, and giddy: and each with his dress alight in half-a-dozen places.
Notes: Dickens at Visuvius.
Chapter 1546: A RAPID DIORAMA
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Chapter progress: 70.72%
Highlight: It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and we may go to see our lottery drawn.
Notes: Dickens plays lottery in Naples.
Chapter 1546: A RAPID DIORAMA
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Chapter progress: 70.74%
Highlight: Away we go again, by muddy roads, and through the most shattered and tattered of villages, where there is not a whole window among all the houses, or a whole garment among all the peasants, or the least appearance of anything to eat, in any of the wretched hucksters’ shops.