Excerpt from Cities of Italy<br><br>As you know, and, I sometimes think, regret, I am one of those for whom the visible world exists, very actively; and, for me, cities are like people, with souls 'and temperaments of their own, and it has always been one of my chief pleasures to asso ciate with the souls and temperaments congenial to me among cities. And as love, or it may be hate, can alone reveal soul to soul, among human beings, so, it seems to me, the soul of a city will reveal itself only to those who love, or, perhaps, hate it, with a far-sighted emotion. I have come upon many cities which have left me indifferent, perhaps through some accident in my way of approach; at any rate, they had nothing to say to me: Madrid, for instance, and Vienna, and St. Petersburg, and Berlin. It would be impossible for me to write about these cities: I should have nothing to say. But certain other cities, Rome, Venice, Seville, how I have loved them, what a delight it was to me merely to be alive, and living in them; and what a delight it is to me to think of them, to imagine myself in their streets and on their waters! Moscow, Naples, how I have hated them.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.